"Do you ever read a story and just feel like the whole thing would work better if the writer had realised their point of view character wasn't the protagonist? Like, there clearly is a story happening, but it isn't happening to them, or indeed where we can see it?"

I've wondered, occasionally, if Jane Austen wasn't pulling a trick like that (deliberately, and for her own amusement) in Emma. Emma leads a tedious, blinkered, very circumscribed life, and all the time away on the far edge of the story, just frustratingly out of view, is the beautiful, accomplished, orphaned doomed-to-be-a-governess star-crossed-lover Real Heroine (who was even saved from sudden dramatic death at sea - offstage!).
But Austen, being Austen, defies the reader, and makes it work. :)