One thing I got wrong about this for a long long time was that this chain isn't linear and it's not (necessarily always) local.

Many people will argue that it's either:

  - a cosmological system (which largely contradicts the intentions of Buddhism, where most cosmological questions are waved away as being irrelevant to the goal of eliminating suffering)

  - an immedate series of one-after-the-other events describing the overall process of mind (which doesn't hold up to basic observational scrutiny).

In reality it's more of a graph of influencing factors that depend on each other. Tuning one's handling of each factor leads to the reduction of suffering in the whole system.

By FAR the best discussion, with textual backing, is https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/ShapeOfSuffering/Contents....