A reasonable guess is that some entities are storing / collecting attacks patiently waiting for one big event. Having smaller constant incidents only helps strengthen the opponent over time, thus making it harder to deploy a coordinated attack that can change history. The dutch narrative in the article is a good example of what happens whem nontechnical people make decisions over long periods of time without major incidents.

This makes sense for nation states playing war games but what about smaller actors? Terror groups seem content blowing up shopping malls and driving cars into parades (which are all things which I imagine are planned on a much shorter scale than your proposed "long game"). Why don't they go after infrastructure and businesses? Surely critical infrastructure is an interesting and attractive target for them?

there's a clue in the name I think. terror, as in deep, mortal fear. the goal of a terror group is to make as many average individuals fear for their lives as possible.

cyberattacks, even significant and disruptive ones, are abstract. it's hard to draw a line from shutting down a pipeline to an individual's sense of mortality. it's not an efficient way to get their message across.

ofc it would be a different situation if terror groups could use a cyberattack to drain the capital out of an entire bank or cause a power plant to go chernobyl.

I mean, we do and have, they just haven't yet been explicitly targeted at critical infrastructure. When they hit critical infrastructure, it has been more of an accident, that gets papered over by just paying the ransom (because it was a financially motivated attack) or the US government getting sufficiently pissed off to intervene directly state-to-state (which kinda happened with the Colonial Pipeline one in 2021).

If the attacks were targeted, were destructively motivated instead of financially motivated, there was no "kill switch", government threats ceased to work, etc... it'd be pretty bad.