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It’s an astonishing forgotten part of World War II. Dozens of reasons, high-performance aviation was relatively new, dozens of new aircraft designs being pushed out of the factory with minimal testing, sometimes with problems that were known to exist but the war time urgency over road redesign. And a gigantic number of 22 year olds flying some 1500 hp aircraft. Instrument flying was in its infancy, Weather prediction was truly abysmal. Radar was new and pretty much only used by the ground in some situations, but didn’t have a lot of application for pilots. It was a carnage

These are excellent points. If there wasn't a war going on, a lot of these planes or even pilots probably wouldn't have been cleared to fly.

(From what I've read of the B-29, that NEVER would have been cleared for use in a peacetime environment. Supposedly, the airstrip at Iwo Jima wasn't needed simply for shot-up planes to use as a divert field; it was because so many of them were ditching in the ocean [to and from Japan] because of mechanical problems.)

True. It had a bad problem with engine fires at the beginning. So did the B-24. In both cases they plowed ahead rather than stop production to address the problem.
They just tried to introduce fixes in models as possible in production. They literally knew most of the early models would be gone soon anyway.
They were not built to last, most of those planes were expected to be wrecks within the first couple of hundred hours.

Iwo Jima saved many many aircrews. The first ones even as the battle raged.