When I read that a motorway has been closed for several hours I do sometimes wonder exactly what they are doing, but I tend to assume that these people know their job, until I get evidence to the contrary. The alternative seems to become one of those people in the pub for whom everyone else is incompetent and who has the answer to everything (usually "a good kick up the backside") but has never actually had to make anything work.
We occasionally have to accept that convenience and safety are going to be somewhat in conflict with each other. In the 1970s there were several horrific motorway pile-ups that started as minor collisions in poor visibility. Then after a serious of other transport-related disasters (Herald of Free Enterprise, Marchioness, Clapham Junction, etc) we got the health and safety culture of today.
The problem is that when that culture gets in your way it's "elf 'n' safety gorn mad", but when it saves your life, you don't know about it. This is something called the "prevention paradox". We are seeing this now in the form of Covid revisionism: "The lockdowns weren't necessary, I never caught it". When taken to extremes this leads to "Why do we need the polio vaccine? Nobody ever gets polio!", which seems to be the actual position of several people in the incoming US administration. 🤦♂️
Anyone who has been on holiday abroad will have noticed that other countries, even rich ones, do not seem to have quite the same attention to H&S as the UK. So perhaps the French do spend less time gathering evidence after a crash, and can open the motorway sooner. But these are choices you make as a society.
Perhaps today's crash was caused by reckless driving. Would we want that prosecuted? How would we feel if someone had died, and then we read in a few months that the driver got off with just a fine for an out-of-date MOT because the police had not had time to collect the relevant evidence from the scene?
Here's something I learned recently: If there's a crash in the dark, the police can tell whether you were driving without lights, because the filament in the bulb is cold and brittle and will break from the impact. Whereas if your lights were on, the filament is hot and springy, and will not break. So a conviction could turn on the police being able to find a headlight bulb in the dark on a wet and windy evening on the motorway.
So yeah, sometimes things go wrong, and you need a plan B. But at least OP's daughter is only in one of the cars in the queue, and not having to be cut out of one at the head of it.