I agree with you in your assessment that protectionism breeds inefficiency, but you are imposing your strictly one sided take on 'what should be' without stopping to consider 'why it is',
it's an answer fit for a class of undergrads, quotes and all, but has little to no real world value as its so generalist in its assumption.
Economics is a black art, and subjectivity matters more than the principles.
This isn't some abstract argument. If you want to talk about India, notwithstanding that India is so vast and complex a nation that only the unwary say "India this" or "India that" broadly, the country had a decades-long history of protectionism since independence, trying to get by with very low levels of international trade, and this being a crucial factor in the 1991 economic crisis: the government had no foreign currency reserves at time when the balance of trade was catastrophic due to rising global oil prices and the demand for modern goods from abroad.
Liberalization of trade is not without its problems - in particular, increasing wealth inequities, and cultural imperialism by economic means. Nevertheless, the subsequent lowering of barriers corrected the crises and has defined India's catapult to the top levels of international manufacturing and service provision.
So the strategy as a whole feeds a cycle of decrepitude, decay, and corruption. Since it's unsustainable, eventually the house of cards collapses and everyone at the bottom of the economic pyramid starves anyway.
It's a particularly nasty case of a policy measure harming the people it was supposed to help. There's an adage in economics, "trade favours the poor"⁽¹⁾. Mark it well.
As a rather extreme example, the so-called "Great Depression" of the 1930s was significantly exacerbated by protectionist trade policies, ostensibly rushed in to shore up local industries with tariffs; in practice this caused the already-declining global levels of trade to collapse entirely.
Protectionism is the opposite of investment and renewal, and an enemy of prosperity.
⁽¹⁾ there's a related saying in political science; "trade stops wars".