I’ve always thought the conclusion here is simple:

In countries without much daycare, daycare tends to be high quality.

In countries without lots of daycare, quality falls.

Why? Because daycare quality DOES NOT SCALE. “Good” daycare isn’t about highly trained workers or high standards— it’s about workers who have rare traits related to love for children and intuitive grasp of how to guide them. These traits are basically untrainable. As such, the bigger a share of kids in daycare, the worse quality becomes.

In Finland where daycare is rare, on the margin subsidizing home care shifts kids out of high quality care into low quality home care.

In Quebec where daycare is universal, on the margin subsidizing daycare shifts kids out of higher quality home care into low quality daycare.

So you can never have any universal care model and are best off subsidizing nothing and just giving parents unrestricted CASH.