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Notes -
A note on the "so who was actually in charge?" question:
The deception that Biden's posse engaged in rankles me, but I think that Biden's level of competence didn't really matter much when it came to the well-being of the US. The global US/Western order can run itself just fine on autopilot for years. The President and the Sec Def could both be literal pieces of wood and nothing particularly bad would happen to the US. The US doesn't face any significant foreign threats that need any kind of quick, decisive thinking. The US is so powerful that to even have a foreign policy is largely a luxury for it, not a need. There are some urgent things that need deciding occasionally, like should the US bomb Iran to stop it from getting nuclear weapons or not, but all that stuff can also run on autopilot or be farmed out to foreign protectorates like Israel. Note that no US Presidential administration for many decades now has pursued a fundamentally different foreign policy from any of the other ones, Trump's included - the foreign policy differences between GWB, Obama, Biden, and Trump are minor in the grand scheme of things. There is a well-established foreign policy consensus that requires only very minimal executive steering. The only actual threat that the US faces from overseas is getting nuked, but the mechanisms by which the US prevents hostile minor countries from obtaining nukes is, I think, pretty well-greased at this point and can largely run itself.
A note on Bernie:
Bernie winning the first three primaries in 2020 was an artifact of the particular order that the primaries are done in. Even after he won those first three primaries, I thought that he would get destroyed in the South and on Super Tuesday. He has just never been popular enough to win the Democratic nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together.
Nobody is popular enough to win a major party nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together. Maybe Dwight Eisenhower.
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