I don't think there's enough in this about a two-part story: just-in-time hollowed out "resilience" to supply chain shock. So, the 'spare capacity' in the system was low, because people had pruned back excess stock holdings on the evidence that JIT was working for decades.

Then, a significant disruption to normal intermodal container flow emerged. This immediately became a compounding problem because its actually pretty chaotic: The containers themselves form a 'just-in-time' supply flow, to meet market EXPECTATIONS of need for the various flows of real supply chain goods and material inputs: When this shock hit, the system stopped having surplus container capactity to move things, which meant it was blocked in "deadlock" around moving things, which made the supply chain fragility problem emerge.

The absolute number of containers hasn't dropped: they're in the wrong places and nobody is willing to fund a one-way zero-profit ship to fix that.

Really, I think the missing word here is "externality" -If the value of an empty container and ship was re-struck in this situation, or some adverse-possession/force-majure was undertaken, the container problem would heal: As it stands, its left to market forces and with nobody willing to carry the costs, nobody is moving to fix things. After all, the evidence is (evidence? Rumour!) there's a market shock coming: who wants to be left with surplus goods, and nobody buying anything?

Its cute to blame this on evergreen and the suez, but its way beyond that. Chinese ports shut down. There's a backlog. African ports clogged up. Moving masks and PPE around disrupted normal flows. Bodies on desks changed.

Shipping runs on paperwork, regulated arbitrage, and a huge amount of personal communications and trust. (as I understand it) much of this evaporated in the crisis.

I think that airline reboot with goods, not people might be part of the answer: absorb the surplus cost, but get things moving again by putting boxes on aircraft for things normally sent in containers on ships. Won't work for coal and iron ore, will work for the plastic bags you need, to start shipping the goods which you've made, which are held up waiting for plastic shipping bags.

Global post is still broken. Before this time, I had basically never lost a letter or parcel in the post. Now, I've lost one, and know of at least one other, and had a delivery from the US take 4-5x as long as normal. I have no idea how christmas is going to work.