I had read earlier that the collision occurred in a narrow channel. But, according to that map, it looks like the collision happened in open water. Curious.
Its a "relatively" narrow shipping lane, as compared with out in the open sea. That area sees 400-500 ships per day going through it, and has "restricted navigation" rules meaning ships are supposed to stay on a prescribed course, stay in their lanes, etc. Its like being on busy freeway.
Perhaps the freighter had a change in scheduling and was told by their dispatcher to change course and head to a different port and was maneuvering around to set their new course when this happened... hard to say without hearing their story.
In any event, both the destroyer and the freighter should have had both radar and people on watch to try and avoid this sort of thing... perhaps human error on both sides of the equation.
I would bet there there are lots of avoided collisions where there's human error on one of two ships involved, and they're avoided in all cases except when there's human error on two involved ships concurrently.