“Could that freighter get close enough to a carrier battle group to get off a decent shot?”
Your question betrays a lot. Today, our FA-18 equipped CVNs dare not get close enough to China, for example, to both protect themselves and launch their planes on land-attack missions. By the time our CVNs are in land-attack range of China, they have long been in range of land-based hypersonic ASMs.
Read up on the Prince of Wales and Repulse, and what our “military experts” thought about warships vs. aircraft then.
So what you’re saying, if I understand correctly, is that our Navy is pretty much “water infantry” to our Air Power “artillery?”
It’s Murphy’s law of military actions: if they are in range, then so are you.
For a carrier group to accomplish anything useful, they need to get their planes within their combat radius to the objective, and hope that range is greater than that of the enemy’s missiles.