Rain-shadows and coastal deserts

I've often been curious as to why western coastlines tend to be dryer and more desert-like than their eastern counterparts. My curiosity has been mostly related to surf-zones, like Western Australia, California, Mexico and Western Africa. You could probably call it confirmation bias, but I seem to have this perception that all western coastlines are surrounded by desert.

Instead of just pondering this coincidence ad nauseam, I decided to do some reading and discovered that there is a reason for this, and it relates to prevailing "trade winds" that flow east-to-west, mostly between the two tropics - Cancer and Capricorn. If we take the USA and Australia for example, these trade winds flow in over the east coast, and have a long, long way to travel before they find themselves back in contact with an ocean. By the time they've crossed the continent, the air mass has caused a lot of precipitation - like rain and snow - so by the time they reach the west coast, that air mass is generally pretty dry.

This relates to another phenomenon known as the "rain shadow. Using the same trade wind example, consider the warm, moist air coming in off the ocean and reaching the east coast. Once that air reaches the coast and rises due to the change in elevation of the land mass, that moist air cools and condenses, causing precipitation. Think of the mountain ranges that run right up and down the length of the east coast of Australia, not far inland from the coast. This is a pretty drastic rise in elevation, which is the cause of significant precipitation along the coast, which is why we often see coastal areas remain lush and green even throughout drought years.

Once that air mass has exhausted its moisture via rainfall on the eastern side of these ranges, this is where we see the rain shadow take place. The lee side (western side in this example) experiences an air mass that has been depleted of its moisture, creating this dry shadow, which continues for as long as that air mass continues across the land mass until it passes over another body of water with which to draw more moisture.

The above may not be 100% geologically or meteorologically accurate, but from what I can gather, it seems to serve as a pretty decent satisfier for my curiosity, so that's what I learned today.

https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9994/why-are-deserts-mostly-located-on-the-western-side-of-continents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow