I will try my best to focus my thoughts into the single question above, but here's what is confusing me about the Bronze Age:
Bronze is an alloy of two metals, two metals that are relatively rare (at least compared to the successor metal of iron).
In order to make bronze you have to get the ratio just right, you can't just throw in a 1:1 mix of copper and tin into your smeltery and call it a day.
Bronze is weaker than iron.
So why is it that even though iron was more common than copper and tin, stronger than bronze, simpler to produce (i.e. only needing to source one metal for your forge), yet we still had a roughly 2000 year span of time where bronze was king?
I know iron has a higher melting point than copper and tin, but is that pretty much the reason why it took so long to switch to iron? Because we couldn't make our fires hot enough?
As you are waiting for answers, you can look at some of our previous threads on the topic. It seems bronze is not always weaker and worse than iron.
In this post, u/Bentresh links to yet more answers on the properties of the metals in question, and discusses the Bronze Age Collapse with u/Iphikrates and other users, and there is also this answer by u/wotan_weevil which compares the two metals.