One sympathetic view of Chamberlin I read was that he was buying time for the British to build up for war. What do you think?
Somebody did their homework. It is true that Winston Churchill by then, was urging these intense preparations. Alas, Chamberlain became a symbol for appeasement. Right or wrong one can take one's choice.
Perhaps my source (Gerhard Weinberg of UNC) is the same as yours, but Chamberlain could not have gone to war in 1938 even if he wanted to.
First off, he was left in bad shape defense-wise by his predecessor, Stanley Baldwin, who refused to have Britain re-arm in any way. It is Baldwin who, IMO, deserves the scorn that is routinely thrown at Chamberlain.
Then, around Munich, Chamberlain was warned by his Air Marshal, “Stuffy” Dowding, that the RAF lacked sufficient aircraft for a war with Germany; the “dominions” (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), without whose assistance Britain could not fight Germany, warned Chamberlain that they would not go to war with Germany over the Sudetenland, which, after all, was the ostensible crisis behind the Munich summits. (Awarding the Sudetenland to the newly-formed Czechoslovakia after WW I was also considered one of Woodrow Wilson’s not-very-bright ideas).
If France and Britain had declared War on Germany after taking the Sudetenland, they'd have rolled them up. Germany would've immediately been fighting a two-front war with GB and France from the west, and the Czechs and quite possibly the Soviets from the East.