Government owned infrastructure is common outside North America.
Autonomous trains work in sealed environments (e.g. a metro tunnel) and make sense when you're running trains every few minutes or less (e.g. a metro system). For freight the ideas are thrown around to scare workers into agreeing to worse terms under the threat of losing their jobs to automation.
Your first point isn't exactly true for the rails relevant to the article. Outside some mining railways, the track is owned by the Australian federal government, like the roads. I don't know how the usage fees and tax structures compare between the two modes.
With regards to your second point, it depends on the cargo as to whether that matters. A lot of the cargo will also travel by ship for some of its journey, and that will take a lot more time, so the land side journey time doesn't really matter.
Autonomous pod bullshit doesn't help here. One of the major advantages of rail freight is the economies of scale. You load up a big efficient train full of stuff because you have so much stuff heading in one direction.
The article actually has a quote that sums up the why:
"It's largely due to the inefficiencies of a fragmented national rail network, ailing infrastructure and government policy and investment that favours road over rail."
The answer is just to invest in rail and incentivise its use.
If you're replacing your phone surely it's better that it doesn't come with the charger (from an environmental point of view), since you don't have to ship it back and they don't have to ship you a new one. And what does it matter if they're on different ships? It would still be pretty much the same amount of emissions released, which is probably less than the amount needed to drive it to your house. Adding the extra packaging for two separate items isn't great though, and I agree that as a customer it isn't great to get less for the same price.
Moroccanoil is an israeli company. The connection to Morocco is that they co-opted a Moroccan product and sell it under their name. There's no reason to believe that their sponsorship would influence a potential Moroccan entrant.
Just to be pedantic, the dumb car tunnels (or Loop), are the weird thing elon "invented" to "solve" traffic and reduce competition for his cars for urban transport. This eventually became one tunnel in LA to get between elon's house and office, and the dumb taxi tunnel in Las Vegas.
The hyperloop, where elon "invented" the vacuum train, is a separate thing that exists to distract from CAHSR, and elon didn't want to work on himself because "he's too busy", and not because it's effectively just a scam and won't work, and most of the companies that started up to develop it have since gone bust.
Did they though? To some extent, yes. But most people just want to get places and will take whichever mode makes the most sense for that journey, and what a city invests in will make that mode make more sense for more journeys. There is also a portion of journeys that just won't happen if they are too difficult.
Your last paragraph is tangential to what I said. It doesn't disagree because it says something different. It's also oversimplified in some ways and just wrong in others.
Beyond the fact that adding five more lanes would still leave you with a horribly inefficient transport system, you also ignore that externalities that you are exacerbating by doing so. You're displacing thousands more people, worsening the division of communities, creating a lot of noise and air pollution, increasing car dependency etc
Comparisons are helpful to find which matches my preferences, and it's helpful to know which phone will process the images in a way that I can get images I like without doing the processing myself.