lol, but then why didn't SW run into this huge mess years ago, or decades ago?

They have, like clockwork.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/southwest-airlines-computer-out...

https://www.globaldatavault.com/blog/southwest-airlines-avoi...

  Southwest Airlines flights across the country were held up Wednesday while the airline
  worked to fix technology problems. … Last October, an outage caused about 800 Southwest flights
  to be delayed and forced employees to issue tickets and boarding passes by hand. 

  Southwest is blaming a faulty router, which it says prompted a widespread network system
  failure; a technology crash pegged as the worst in the airline’s history. The reservation
  system was knocked offline, planes were grounded across the nation, and the outage took four
  full days to resolve.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2019/02/22/sou...

  Southwest Airlines suffered a computer outage early Friday
  that temporarily grounded flights across the country, adding
  to a string of recent flight woes at the airline..

https://www.wlrn.org/news/2021-06-15/southwest-airlines-resu...

  A nationwide weather data outage disrupted Southwest
  Airlines flights Monday night, causing long delays for
  some passengers across the country. The company blamed the
  problem on issues with Southwest's third-party weather data
  provider.

As for the 2022 meltdown:

  The problem this time around is that Southwest suffers from
  the same labor shortage as all other airlines in the industry,
  and it's this labor shortage that led to their other
  deficiencies from biting them in the ass. Unfortunately,
  culture can't solve a crisis when there simply aren't
  enough people to "band together."

Nonsense. Arguably Southwest needs more staff because its operations are so archaic, however Southwest had plenty of ramp rats and crew. The problem was Southwest had no idea where its crew actually were or what they were doing. The CEO can't charm their way out of that nor can they simply throw bodies at the problem.

Speaking of culture, the rugged individualism is absolutely a problem but that's still a Herb thing. Up north Sunwing is having massive operational problems but they were willing to charter planes to aid in recovery.