And as has been said on other threads about this topic - were the individual airlines to have saved that money (taking the hit on interest rates before deploying it now), the amounts we're talking about would barely cover a few months of total operations per airline.

Am not an apologist by any stretch, but the narrative is "they should have created a black swan fund instead of share buybacks". But they'd have been skewered for years by the trade press for keeping billions of dollars in sub-optimal immediate cash form in order to buy a little extra time.