This is all pretty obviously true. I would contend that it's fueled, for the most part, by the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and the need for eyeballs/clicks, as well as social media algorithms that create self-reinforcing echo chambers. Unfortunately, those things aren't going away any time soon.
The trickier part is the solutions, although there are some obvious ones. Ranked-choice voting seems obvious as a solution, but hard to implement, as the people who currently control the voting process (incumbents) would be most harmed by it. Ditto for the elimination of winner-take-all and the implementation of a more proportional representation system.
A more proportional representation system is the only way to have more than two viable parties for more than an election cycle or two. Under the current system, a third party can make a run at winning a national election temporarily, but eventually it will either fold into one of the existing parties, or it will become one of the two dominant parties by causing the displaced party to fold into it.
One of the drawbacks of a system with just two major parties is that there really can't be a centrist party. In many other democratic countries, a centrist party builds a coalition that faces pressure from both more right-leaning parties and more left-leaning parties. It's usually easier to build a coalition from the center than from the fringes. This is a nice feature.
In the United States, neither major party is really a centrist party. As long as popular elections decide things, there is a natural pull toward the center in general elections. The party that sticks closer to the center will generally win the popular vote. (See:
median voter theorem.) This, too, is a nice feature.
But if we do away with the popular vote, I believe things can go to hell very quickly. The electoral college is close enough to the popular vote that I don't think eliminating it should be much of a priority. (Indeed, there are decent arguments for keeping it even if we had the choice to do away with it. For one thing, the electoral college makes recounts possible. It'd be nearly impossible to do a recount of the national popular vote -- which would make close, contested elections a total poop show.)
But that assumes that the electoral college will be constrained by the popular vote in each state. If highly gerrymandered state legislatures decide to do away with the popular vote for President, all hell may break loose. Our democracy may perish*.
That seems like a very serious concern that ought to be a much greater focus than mere voter suppression. People can often overcome voter suppression by standing in line longer. How can they overcome just having their votes not count at all?
It would have been trivial, I think, a decade or two ago, to ratify a constitutional amendment saying that each state must award the majority of its delegates to whichever candidate wins a majority (or maybe a plurality) of that state's popular vote in any Presidential election.
Today, I don't think it would pass. Instead of being viewed as an obvious procedural housekeeping rule, it would be viewed as a partisan power grab.
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*This seems like a good reason for Congress to try to do something about gerrymandering in state legislatures, to whatever extend that's possible.
