the F35 program does seem to actually function

15-40% of the time, depending on the variant, and going down very fast with the age of the airframes, with 7-year old planes being down to 10-15% (https://hexbear.net/post/6018345/6468713) - and the lower figures are for the carrier and VTOL variants, which are the ones key to US power projection (especially since, as recent events have shown, the US can no longer rely on being able to actually fly from its bases in a given region).

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean the F-35 is uniquely bad, but rather represents the inherent challenges of such a complex aircraft - maybe the Chinese stealth fighters would end up having similar readiness issues down the line too (although I think they at least are not committing the same boondoggle of wanting the same base aircraft to be developed into both ground-based and carrier-based variants, which seems to be one of the sources of the F-35s troubles). It's like the Tiger II tank - its reliability issues don't necessarily reflect on the German engineers being incompetent fools, but rather that the concept of the 70t heavy tank was inherently flawed (at least with the engine/suspension tech of the time), and no amount of engineering genius could get you around plain physical limitations. The American M26 Pershing (a heavy-later-redesignated-to-medium tank), at a much lighter 42t, also faced reliability issues, and while the Soviet IS-2, at 46t, was generally reliable, it had to make a lot of ergonomic sacrifices in order to bring the tank down to that weight, which led to a dreadfully slow rate of fire of like 1-1.5 rounds per minute (later improved to 2-3 with upgrades).

While stealth capability is certainly useful and does clearly work to some extent, the evaluation of technology in a material realm of limited resources should always include not just effectiveness, but also efficiency, that is, "was this the best way to spend these resources?". To go back to WW2 - strategic bombing causes a lot of debates, for a similar reason. It's not that it was ineffective - there's plenty of bombed out factories (and homes) to attest to that, but the actual results can start seeming somewhat less impressive when considering the literally thousands of destroyed airframes and tens of thousands of dead pilots sacrificed to achieve them. Would the Allies have perhaps been served better making more tanks, or various other industrial outputs? Now, counterfactuals like this are never going to have clear answers, but they're still important to think about. In the F-35s case, would the US, perhaps, have been better served by going the Russian path, and pouring those billions of dollars into missile development?

For example, here's an article (from just a couple days before the war began), not specifically about the F-35 but tackling some such questions:

Some analysts will see this surge as proof the United States needs a larger Air Force. They misdiagnose the problem. Airpower is not the same as the Air Force, and the pursuit of ever more exquisite aircraft has left the service less relevant to the airpower mission it claims to own. Air denial increasingly falls to the Army, electronic warfare to the Navy, and persistent strike capacity to ships and submarines.

Exquisite platforms buy exquisite capability for a narrow target set. They do not buy persistence — and persistence is what strategically effective airpower requires. Punishment, as Thomas Schelling argued, depends on the credible threat of continuing pain. What compels an adversary is not a single devastating blow, but the belief that costs will keep coming. Denial aims to degrade capabilities and foreclose retaliation. Both require sustained presence over time, which in turn demands mass.

The gaps this buildup exposes are not in Air Force strike capabilities. They are in the Army’s ability to sustain air denial at scale, in the munition inventories required for persistence, and in the tanker fleet that keeps U.S. warplanes airborne. More B-21s and F-47s address none of these shortfalls. No procurement strategy centered on $700 million bombers or $300 million fighters can generate sustained presence at scale. The Air Force does need more airpower—but not the kind it is buying. Persistent presence requires large numbers of lower-cost drones that can absorb losses, deep stockpiles of low-cost munitions that can sustain fires over time, and uncrewed aerial refuelers that can keep fighters and bombers over target areas. These are the capabilities that generate sustained effects at affordable cost—and they are consistently deprioritized in favor of the next exquisite crewed platform.

The deeper problem runs beneath procurement. Washington has long treated “airpower” and “Air Force” as synonymous. They are not. Air control — the ability to deny an adversary the use of the domain while preserving one’s own — is increasingly accomplished by Army interceptors, Navy strike platforms, drones, and munitions fired from ships and submarines. The Air Force’s preferred model — manned fighters striving for air superiority so manned bombers can reach their targets — has yet to demonstrate the scale and stamina needed to bring a conflict to an end.

We'll see if the article's last guess will turn out to be right.