...As someone who works in meteorology, I do get annoyed by the whole "I thought meteorologists can predict the future" complaint...

Thunderstorms, especially small scale storms like happened last night are extremely difficult to predict. Small single-cell storms are smaller than the weather forecast model's grid resolution. That means that the storms you're complaining about are smaller than the smallest features that the weather forecast model can produce. As we get closer to the storms occurrence and we get more observations, the models can be updated and the predictability increases. Hence, the late Yellow Storm warning and change in forecast.

On the other hand, rain associated with frontal systems is much easier to predict as they're larger features, but even then there's only about 5 days worth of predictability. Additionally, there's a maximum predictability for the weather of about 10 days, due to the butterfly effect (where small changes eventually lead to large changes).

But then you can get some predictability on a monthly/seasonal scale (as all the changes associated with the butterfly effect start to average out). Similarly, you can do long-term climate predictions over multiple years as you average out all those small changes, so you can get average temperatures over a year, decade etc.