> And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
With all due respect, this is Americentric nonsense. If you had to rank the most important British naval battles obviously Trafalgar is at the top. The Nile, Jutland, and even arguably the Armada campaign are also much more important.
A British loss at Trafalgar would not have prevented the Prussians from tipping the scale in favor of the anti-Napoleonic coalition at Waterloo ten years later. And for good reason: continental Europe was the center of world power, the main chessboard where it was measured and exercised, not overseas backwater where naval blockades could only go so far. And I'm only paraphrasing Brzezinski's famous book here.
I wonder whether you are wrong for the same reason that the people are wrong who say the main chessboard in WWII was the area between the Rhine and the Volga. It ignores the high toll imposed on Germany by its being extremely restricted for most of the war in its ability to ship anything (and to receive shipments initiated by non-German entrepreneurs) while the allies were much less restricted so that for example the Soviets fighting on this "main chessboard" had supplies flowing in from Murmansk, Vladivostok and the Persian Corridor through Iran. IIRC the value of these supplies in 2026 dollars is about a trillion dollars (largely paid for by London and Washington).
Sorry but this reply is too oblique for me to provide a constructive rebuttal. Fact of the matter is, Russia was the beginning of the end for Napoleon whose fate was sealed through a series of timeline-altering strategic blunders that more ample supply chains would not have remedied.
With all due respect, this is Americentric nonsense. If you had to rank the most important British naval battles obviously Trafalgar is at the top. The Nile, Jutland, and even arguably the Armada campaign are also much more important.