the western allies let Russia carry the weight of war, the long-awaited western front arrived quite late
In my opinion, the Nazis were going to lose anyway. They were never going to match Russia and the USA in the manufacture of tanks and aircraft
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I don't think anybody held back. It was a two-front campaign for the Western Allies, with the Japanese holding on in the Pacific, fighting for every inch of territory. Which is why Russia was so essential to victory. With Russia's entry into the war, Germany now had two fronts to battle. As you rightly explain, from that moment, the war was lost for Germany.
I agree here. The Japanese owe their defeat to the U.S. for the most part. This is especially true because of the industrial might of American industries. The same can be said of the Russians. Huge amounts of manufactured goods and human capital.
However, the Allies did delay on a 2nd Front in Europe. It can be debated why, but the strategy was much different than in the Pacific where the U.S. "hopped" Japanese occupied islands to cut them off. Whereas, an invasion of France instead of North Africa and Italy from the beginning would have placed a much bigger burden on the Germans.
It seems to many that GB and the U.S. were more interested in controlling the Mediterranean than opening a 2nd Front. The motives behind this will always be questioned, but most importantly the perception of the Soviet leaders was that GB and the U.S. were hanging them out to dry.
I don't know, of course. There will always be revisions and re-revisions of history. I find the truth of the past, especially the truth about motive, to be elusive. The war was an all-out effort, on all sides. We forget sometimes that this wasn't a war over pieces of territory, but for existential survival. The war shaped the modern world. It redrew maps and shifted global power. I'm sure, as millions died in the Soviet Union, the Allied concentration elsewhere must have seemed wrong--but I couldn't begin to comment on the strategy, from the Allied perspective.