Idk, obviously being armchair generals is inherently a comical position to assert anything from, but also every single real time strategy game I have played has involved the same mechanic, if you start to lose the air war decisively, it snowballs extremely quickly. You have to “keep the enemies air force in a bottle” to some degree, if they can smash any air defenses you deploy from multiple directions with aircraft every time you attempt to deploy air defenses it tends to be VERY bad news for you. Everything else becomes a minor problem in contrast very quickly.

The thing about real life is I can only imagine how much more this is brutally true when expressed in real warfare and not in abstracted games built off of narrow aspects of it.

Imagine if the US had actually given all the Tomahawks we just wasted on Iran in an illegal war to Ukraine instead? The russian war machine is fucked regardless, but this would have been a far more decisive moment if Ukraine had access to Tomahawks as well as its own long range precision strike munitions to exploit the collapse of russian air defenses.