When a 20th century state decides to convert to a war economy, they are committing to a drastic change in every facet of economic life. Huge numbers of people (especially farmers) are conscripted. Factories stop making cars and start making bombers. Food becomes scare. Consumer goods become even more scarce.

There is only one way in the 20th century that this was accomplished. Basically the government takes over the economy and a market economy (to a greater or lesser degree) in peacetime becomes a command or centrally planned economy in wartime. No citizen or firm gets to opt-out of this process, it's coercive by one means or another. If you manage a firm and you want to make and sell say, cooking pots, too bad, you don't get a metal allocation/ration, your workers get drafted, and then you get drafted or go out of business and have to take a job in a munitions factory to keep yourself fed (or more likely you direct your firm to find a way to make bullets instead of frypans). This is actually what the government intends, they want to basically control as much production as possible and direct it towards war material. A pound of steel not in a frying pan can be put into a warship.

Rationing and Price Ceilings are just one tool in the arsenal government bodies will use to take a huge chunk of civilian production and force it into wartime uses.

Of course, it's quite difficult to organize the governmental machinery to centrally plan an economy during the war. A lot of stuff gets mismanaged. Too many farm workers are drafted and the harvest rots in fields, or too many guns are produced but not enough ammunition. Often a rationing scheme goes awry like the one you quoted. Sometimes if they're clever, governments realize that a given rationing approach won't be optimal, say, if you ration rubber tires, people will just run their vehicles until the tires fall off and then absenteeism will rise because they can't get to work. Instead, governments may ration Gasoline/Petrol, (whether there is a shortage or not) and then people only drive essential trips and find other ways to get to work. So rationing can work better or worse depending on how it is structured and organized and it's difficult to manage correctly.

Basically the government knows that rationing is not a perfectly efficient option, but they don't know any less coercive and ham handed way to organize the economy. Rationing is actually less coercive and inefficient than pillage and forced labor, which the Germans used extensively in WWII, and was quite common in war before the 20th century as well.

Generally the more voluntary cooperation from citizens and firms the government can elicit, the less central planning and coercion it has to do. Paying farmers more to work 18 hour days and sell the produce at the market (or to the rationing authority) is better than sending men with guns to force them to work 18 hour days and confiscate crops. But if you pay farmers too much, then something else somewhere in the vast web of the economy pinches and causes inefficiency. Perhaps coal miners can't afford to eat and go on strike or people quit their jobs at munitions factories to scrounge for food in the countryside.

A war economy is just inherently a muddle. The perfect frictionless method of control and coercion just wasn't a thing in WWI, was sometimes better a generation later in WWII (but sometimes also, much, much worse) and hasn't been attempted since.

So nobody has really tried to create a system of central planning to run a war economy without rationing, and any speculation or modelling about something that complex seems like a doomed project.

Sources:

Klein, Maury "A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War Two"

Tooze, Adam "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy"