You don't need peter for this one: The action date is indicating the place in the queue of the application they are currently working on. Every month they don't deal with 1 month worth of applications: Sometimes it might take 6 months to go through a single month of applications, other times it can move much faster. Either way, it all depends on what was submitted a long time ago, their maximum speed, and the number of visas allotted: It's possible for USCIS to run out of visas for a country and just process nothing more for the rest of the year.
So its all normal, it's been happening for decades, and there's been no significant action in the legislature to speed things up. As things are right now, there are specific queues where the delay might as well mean 'forever', because it's going to take many decades for the current processing speed to reach July 2025.
So just SOL here, and nothing that can be done but wait? :(