Vertical Drainage

I mean if you add better draining substrate it will of course help, but it’s also guaranteed to fill up with whatever is around it over time.

But sure if you drill 25 holes in an area with a large core auger and add sand or something that area will drain much better, they do it at golf courses routinely.

It only works if you have an impermeable thin clay layer over a sand layer which drains. Watch the video.The guy has a few inches of peaty looking topsoil then white sand. That's common in low coastal areas. In my BTR yard all I have is a thin installed topsoil over many feet of clay. Fortunately, my lot slopes enough for surface drainage.

With our high water table and clay sois, you can either replace a huge amount of clay with a more permeable substrate, or more realistically you just have to give the water a path to drain to a lower spot.

Even if you replaced your entire yard with 2' of gravel and then soil on top, your gravel would fill up with water if there was no place for it to drain away.

That hole method works for some things. I did something very similar near my wife's office and mini-split drain line. That little trickle is handled fine in a deep pit of gravel.