“Sorta like steering your cargo ship into the path of a hurricane.”
If you check the Jet Route Navigation charts, you can see that a great many of those jet routes pass over areas of armed conflict, because going around them is both hazardous and economically devastating. Using many of the routes around the conflict zones requires the aircraft to encounter powerful headwinds in the jet stream, hazardous weather systems, and increased risks of fuel starvation. Hundreds of commercial aircraft used that jet route with safety the same day. The only reason a problem occurred with this ground radar guided missile is because the Russians deliberately shot the aircraft out of the sky, likely thinking it was either one of their own Russian passenger planes nearby being used in a false flag incident or a Ukrainian military transport. It is becoming difficult to travel by air most places in the world without potentially being targeted by a Russian- built surface-to-air missile launcher.