It's not just making it more expensive, it's tying every single little thing that comes into the country up in an endlessly-growing loop of red tape that CBP has no way to handle. The de minimis exemption in most countries isn't motivated primarily by not hitting the little guy but by the fact that trying to enforce it for millions of low-value items would bring postal systems to a standstill.
This was exploited from the other side by sending billions of low-value packages, so now the EU adds €3 per article category (so 2 shirts = €3, 1 shirt and 1 spoon = €6) to every package that's under other customs thresholds (€150 usually). With the view this will be eventually replaced by automating the tariff calculation for every package in a few years.
As a result, the number of imported packages dropped anywhere from 30% to 80%, we'll have to wait for the full numbers, but there is a reason to expect something similar will happen in the US.
For what? Only 10 packages per person/year, less than one per month. Previously you made is sound like 10s of billions of packages were saturating the services.
Don't bend over backwards to defend utterly oppressive regulations, simply increasing the de-minimums would reduce or eliminate package splitting, limiting the number of packs per shipping address would help too - there are many ways to solve this self-inflicted problem which comes from Byzantine regulations that use protectionism as a Trojan horse to achieve other sneaky objectives.
