I think the more general point here is that, because LEO is a place, people tend to think of it as being kind of like Central Park or Spain, giving them misleading intuitions about what kinds of interactions to expect. A good starting point for your intuition pump is to remember that the surface area of LEO is basically the same as the surface area of Earth. It's slightly larger, because the radius is larger, but the radius is only about 8% larger in this case.

Now consider that we're talking about, in this case, satellites distributed over 30 km of altitude (thickness). This gives you a volume that's roughly ten times the volume of the Earth's oceans. (You can throw in the crust too if you find it helpful.) So instead of thinking about shrapnel from a barrel bomb trying to hit a microwave oven in Central Park, think about trying to hit a microwave oven somewhere in the oceans of ten Earth-sized planets. Even with a 7-km-per-second supertorpedo with two months of fuel, it's not going to be easy without guidance.

Space, in short, is big.

I'd like to blame stupid movies like Star Wars and Gravity for this, but I think it's just the kind of cognitive error the humans are unavoidably prone to. It's easy to get results that are off by nine orders of magnitude like this when you just rely on your untutored intuition.

The other counterintuitive thing about LEO is that, though for hypervelocity collisions it's a three-dimensional space, for things like rendezvous or getting from your launch trajectory to your desired orbit, it's a six-dimensional space of orbital elements. For understanding the results of a barrel bomb in orbit, it may be more useful to think of the nails as being distributed across a small ball of this six-dimensional space in the six-dimensional point occupied by the barrel, rather than gradually spreading out in a complicated way in three-dimensional space. The humans are not good at intuitively reasoning about six-dimensional spaces either.