It is asymmetrical warfare. A hundred plus ships went through the straight daily. Attackers only need to occasionally damage a ship to make the crossing look deeply unappealing. No military intervention can promise 100% defense to passing vessels.
Everyone in the DoD with triple-digit IQ knew that this would be the most likely outcome of starting a war with Iran, but all of those people got purged by Trump last year.
---
[1] The status quo was that Iran was not in control of the strait, and all shipping traffic could pass through it.
[2] Iran has so far accomplished it's objectives in the war, the US and Israel did not. It didn't get regime-changed, and its in now in control of the strait.
Obviously 50-50 doesn't pencil out at $100 or even $200 a barrel. But 1:50 might at $2xx. IDK I'm not a shipping expert.
Someone could say the risk is financially worth it, but you are not going to have many takers. Also might find few crew who want to sign onto your vessels.
There are a lot of human beings on those ships. It strikes me as awful that their lives would be risked under these circumstances, and that happening wouldn't really be a proper solution to the overarching problem. It would be something of a tragedy if things got so severe that the risk was assumed worthwhile and presumably, people on board were exposed to it outside of their will or control. I suspect many of them don't have a lot of options.
I also see false equivalence here in that the risk of death doesn't seem fungible. You're taking an aggregate death toll distributed across hundreds of millions of people, involving totally different voluntariness and causal structures.
Iran is not very nice to the ships, judging from videos and results of attacks.
There's a very noticeable difference. There are no parties, music videos, ship tours to abducted ships... with Iran, etc.
With Iran, the ships end up like this https://t.me/QudsNen/216170 or this https://t.me/presstv/179430