Since the era of containerization, the number of possible destinations has dropped a lot. A few ports handle the vast majority of cargo, and it’s trains and trucks that do the point to point work. And multiple cranes can work on a single ship. Bigger ships are more efficient in terms of maximizing time spent shipping and minimizing time spent not shipping, and until now that efficiency swamped all the others. They have just gotten so big that other efficiencies (like standardized port sizes) have begun to matter.
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