The early universe made dust faster than its stars can account for. ALMA and JWST observations find galaxies at redshifts 7 and 8 (A1689-zD1, REBELS survey systems) holding dust masses of 10^7 solar masses and more, when the universe was too young for the canonical slow factory, asymptotic giant branch stars requiring a gigayear of evolution, to have contributed: the dust must come from supernovae, and the arithmetic strains. Each supernova's net yield, after the reverse shock destroys freshly minted grains, is measured in the few-hundredths of a solar mass; building 10^7 solar masses of dust within a few hundred Myr requires either yields at the optimistic extreme, destruction switched conveniently off, or extremely rapid grain growth in the interstellar medium, itself inefficient at low metallicity. This is the dust budget crisis, and it compounds the chemical-maturity puzzle: dust is metals, so every gram doubles as evidence of fast enrichment.
The local calibration adds its own tension: dust-to-gas ratios across galaxies track metallicity, but with a scatter and a low-metallicity steepening that chemical evolution models reproduce only with tuned accretion and destruction timescales, and high-redshift systems scatter off the local relation in both directions. ΛCDM's timeline owns the binding constraint: with first stars near z of 20 to 25 and hierarchical assembly throttling early star formation, the integrated supernova count available to any z of 7 to 8 galaxy is capped, and the observed dust reservoirs press against the cap even under the most generous yield assumptions.
The standing is a budget audit chronically in deficit: each deeper ALMA measurement adds reservoirs, the yield-and-destruction physics refuses to supply them on schedule, and JWST's mid-infrared dust censuses are extending the audit to ever-earlier epochs.