I have said all along that the fairly recent scarcity of .22 rim fire ammo is intentional, and intended to reduce the number of weapons available for defense of the Homeland. A .22 Long Rifle round is light and compact, and out of a RIFLE is sufficiently powerful, is very accurate and easy to shoot, is capable of deep penetration, and will take out humans out to at least 100 yards, or more. Drying up the .22 ammo effectively takes about half of the available effective weapons out of the citizens’ hands.
I think the shortage is because there are many more shooters now. Seems to me the newbies probably do a lot of junk shooting, just blasting for fun. When I was a kid, I would use one or two boxes of 50 in a whole year. Picked each target carefully, and I didn’t have a semi-auto.
.22 traditionally sold cheap and there was little profit margin. No incentive to invest $$ in production capacity when they can do better selling center fire ammo.