I would suggest in this case AA was not alone. BA scrapped their 747s, AC Shelved thier Rouge 767s and a lot more airlines did a lot of similar things.

The only exception I can think of is Kirby over at UA who apparently picked up as much metal as they could in 21/22 and came our of it with more capacity than anyone else. I'll bet you if one searches on FT during those times, they'll find a bunch of Armchair CEOs who were saying UA was stuipid for moving up deliveries and picking up planes while everyone else was zagging... Welcome to FT.