I ended up having a call with my representative last night, she is drafting an email for my local MP. She said that Immigration lawyers have been complaining about the online system for months now, as they are also finding that the systems are glitchy and IRCC doesn't have the infrastructure to fully support it- response time even for lawyers from IRCC is really lengthy and like clients can often feel that requests are just being ignored. So it's not just us who are frustrated with how slow/unresponsive the system is- they've raised it with IRCC and effectively been brushed off.
Issues like the one I'm having where they forgot to send portal login credentials but created a case in the portal for me that I can't access should be a < 24 hr response time. Then there are the other things such as statuses or peoples applications not being accurately reflected in online systems shouldn't exist in this day and age- it's 2022 not 1993 when it comes to web technology.
In the past decade I've dealt with USCIS and the Swedish Migration Office and both were far better experiences than dealing with IRCC.
I think I might just be grumpy this morning