I agree. It’s silly to act like a Carrier is some vulnerable dinosaur. They are not out there alone either. In the kind of war where a nation would think it was cool to try to sink a carrier, the screening force or USN subs will be aggressively killing anything that gets close.
Use a nuke on a fleet and that will be the last act of that nation.
A USN carrier task force really isn’t really such an easy thing to target, or it would have already been done.
If you look at Soviet (okay, Russian these days) exercises simulating a strike on a carrier, it is clear that this is no easy mission. They are willing to put a tremendous amount of resources into a strike, and it’s clearly a one-way mission either for most of the strike force or for all of it. It’s also clear that they think it’s worth trying because of the danger posed by a carrier, or they wouldn’t keep trying to figure it out.
Having been on carriers (after I left the Navy) and on subs (never as a carrier escort but I have played against a carrier), I know that taking down a carrier would be extremely difficult. A single attack could easily cost Russia almost as much as the carrier cost us, and their probability of success (defined as a mission kill against the carrier itself, not just a few aircraft splashed or a couple of DDGs taken out) would still not be good.