My experience with w-2s. Some larger employers do not send them out until the end of January, although my current employer sends it out shortly after he receives them, so I get that by the middle of January.
1099s almost never arrive before the middle of Feb. and some take until mid March to arrive.
IMO there is no way that the IRS can send out any refunds before March 1 with any amount of credibility because all of the W-2 and 1099 information is not available for cross-checking. I would suspect that there are insufficient programs in place in order to validate information sent in on returns, particularly since we are dealing with the government, even if the processing date were delayed.
Years ago this probably wasn’t a problem because the level of identity theft, forgery, etc. wasn’t as much of an issue, particularly when people were dealing with IRS.
There is an old saying that “Haste makes waste”. The entire tax system and IRS needs to be replaced because this is only going to get worse.