The trade off is a huge intertwined grid that would handle loads faster but that would be very expensive and would string power-lines in places people would not want. The trade off is the occasional cascade and ignorant people seeing black helicopters.
In the Navy I was an IC-man on one of the first 1200lb steam systems. It took the EMs a bit of work to get it dialed in. And this was a micro grid compared to what the power companies run these days.
Large systems have a lot of inertia, so to speak, so small problems have little or no effect. So to pull a nuke off it would take a pretty good bang, I would like to see how the grid in that area is configured. We had a lot of System operator types posting during the Ohio outage very informative.