Baloney. I sell lots of Cisco from UCS to VOIP, switching, etc. The ETAs are 3-6 weeks at best. Then you look at HP, Juniper, 3 Par and I can call one of the big 3 distributors and have their products at my loading dock the next day.
There's a reason why I have an Asus RT-AC66U 802.11ac home router....
They’ve done it before, in 2001 and ~2006-2007. I’ve been watching them bubble inventory and then have to write it down several times. . .
Your conflating inventory and delivery performance.
While one may impact the other it is not 100% correlation. Delivery performance is also impacted by transit time, customs clearance, etc. The lead times quoted to sales by manufacturing are based on this information plus inventory, plus rebuild time (which is impacted by capacity and component lead times), plus size of the order (if it exceeds max order quantity to prevent a stock out for other customers).
I could go on but it’s what I have to do every day and too close to real work...