It seems to play out the same way every time. I'm not sure why anyone thought a shutdown would actually have happened.

I would have preferred a government shutdown until the inauguration. Let the new administration handle the clean-up, the firings and the forced resignations. They are going to do it anyway if they produce on their promises. They could have had a head start that way.

Typ, pretty much.

Wikipedia said 76 times since 1961 for a neat 1.25 a year

It's a function of the structure of the US govt. Both parties do it pretty regularly, though the R party has been responsible for most of them in the past decade. It's kind of an "instant win" button a party can press to get legislation passed that ordinarily would have no other chance to get passed.

In order for the government to get funded, the funding bill has to pass the senate, house, and president, any one of those parties refusing to pass the bill can cause a shutdown. Trump, for example, used this power while president to try to force the addition of a border wall to the budget, but the democrats who controlled the senate refused to fund it. (At this point, senate and house had both passed a funding bill, it was the president's veto that caused the shutdown). Given that democrats controlled the senate, there was basically zero chance of this getting funded at any other time, as the funding bill would have to pass house + senate + get a presidential signature, so this was the point where Trump had the most leverage to get it done.

Other governmental systems have ways of dealing with this problem, all with their pros and cons. For example, in some representative democracies, if the legislature can't pass a budget within x days, the legislature is dissolved and snap elections are held. But this strategy only works if the legislative makeup changes as a result of the election which is no guarantee.

not a new thing

Happens every now and again, on average once every 1.5 years or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_debt_ceiling#:~:text=The%20debt%20ceiling%20was%20raised,times%20from%202001%20to%202016.