I'm not saying it definitely was an attack, nor even that it likely was. Just that it's premature to "definitely" rule it out so soon, just 3 weeks out, given the incentives involved & base rates of both extortion/vandalism & (often well-meaning but at the very-leats ass-covering) reporting-misdirection about the same.
You seem to agree with me that it remains a possibility, so not sure we actually disagree about any particulars of the event, just the discussion.
Imagine there were a well-refereed, bettable proposition like, say, "By the end of 2030, will either (a) someone be criminally charged for contributing to the Southwest service disruptions of late 2022; or (b) will a knowledgeable Southwest insider or law enforcement agent report they saw evidence that intentional acts worsened the Southwest service disruptions of late 2022?"
Just from base rates of such mischief, & without yet digging deeper, I'd consider an answer of "YES" to have around a 2-3% chance. And something with a 1-in-50 chance of having happened is absolutely a valid topic of speculation deep in forums like this!
Such tail events are where lots of the big wins, & big losses, for industry & society arrive – but also, such real-but-rarer outcomes get habitually ignored by simple mainstream summary coverage, which needs to put neat bows on stories for uninformed & distracted audiences, by short deadlines.
To protest deep in the threads, and insist that a 3-weeks old official-spokesperson story is "definitely" the whole explanation, case-closed, stop-speculating-its-hurting? That's actually hostile to helping curious people understand a complex world based on limited & conflicted information sources.
> So, only the naive would rule it out entirely based on only self-serving public narratives.
I don't technically disagree, but it is also just as naive to ignore our human proportionality bias and discount the relative probability of the available evidence.