While I see where you're coming from, I kind of hope we never need that sense of urgency again haha

Less red tape would be good, but there are still a lot of people who remember things like thalidomide. For regular things, the need for the process is critical. Often, research, funding, or various stages of trials and other testing is delayed because the benefits or results of previous stages/documentation did not clearly show what the approvers needed to see, or the information provided was suspect.

Note that some cases, such as approval for off-label uses for medicines that are already proven safe, work their way through the process much faster, since the main question is the efficacy; the question about safety was previously answered in earlier work/approvals.

For the COVID vaccines, saying that it was "streamlined" almost does not do it justice. If a step was completed at 8:00 PM on a Friday for anything else, the next step would not start until Monday at the earliest. For COVID, the people involved in the next step would be at the office at 7:30 PM, waiting for the previous step to be complete, and they would be prepared to work overnight, then hand off to the next step at 6:00 AM Saturday morning, and so on.

It is an unsustainable pace overall, but it worked for that single need.