Both, mainly the news though.
I'm sure at this point there is a ton of YouTube videos on this, but a start is the FAA regs on airspace:
It's actually a very efficient if you know what's going on, the obvious goal is to keep planes from hitting each other. Most of the perceived inefficiencies are because people describe what's going on wrong "the towers telling the plane to circle the airport"
. Looking at a map the routes may seem like they are taking you the long way to you destination, but the controllers are sequencing planes in for approaches a few hundred miles from the destination, avoiding weather, different equipment capabilities on the aircraft etc.
I have a friend who is a center controller back in Chicago and the stories he was telling when the centers were getting whacked by COVID evacuations are pretty crazy. As in they would close it in the middle of the day and hand it all off to another center type stuff and or a few major airports reverting back to non controlled airspace when they closed the tower due to the coof. Non controlled meaning it's the pilots job to see and avoid each other as opposed to a controller.
I wanted to go into ATC but at the time it was hard to get in and they JUST started hiring controllers off the street. Before you had to go to thier special academy. That and you would have to deal with pilots all day which is miserable in and of itself.