>Doesn't matter the reason, net net less goods were produced.

That's not how GDP works? It's not adding up all the things that were made, it's measuring the value an economy produced.

A quirk of that is imports are value an economy consumes (usually offset by Foreign Direct Investment).

If those ships decided to bail from LA and head to Japan, would the economy have 'produced less'?

Isn't your whole point that goods were already paid for in one quarter but were held up until the next quarter to clear? If consumption and import were in the same quarter then it doesn't affect GDP at all in an accounting sense. But in your example, you get a +GDP in the quarter that consumption happened, making it seem like domestic production went up, then against that baseline you get a -GDP "due to" imports the next quarter, so you must "lose" the domestic production as a correction.

If the ships bailed and stole your money or destroyed their goods I'm not sure if that still counts as imports or not.

My point is that an amount of economic activity happened (let's simplify and say that its consumption/investment/government spend).

GDP measures how much a country makes, but that's only a proxy for economic activity because trade imbalances exist (and the US economy greatly benefits from its trade imbalance).

So the unprecedented lumpiness of imports shouldn't mislead you into thinking US domestic economic activity is down, when in fact it's just being financed differently (now more via trade imbalance than in previous quarters).

Again, all circling back to my point that the 2Q's of GDP rule is dumb.