It's vastly different when it's a local outage and there's functioning equipment outside the effected area. How will communicate the needs of grid stations with no electronics, satellites, internet? How will this be coordinated? How will the trucks moving the equipment be able to refuel when the grid is down everywhere, and everyone is rushing to gas stations and clogging the freeways? How can even emergency services coordinate responses?

If transformers do blow, the big ones at substations and stations... We don't tend do keep spares of those on hand. They're very often made to order, with a multi-week lead time, and that's with a functioning power grid to produce and coordinate them, again.

No utility in the US has enough transformers on hand to replace them in the case that they all fail, hundreds of millions of transformers.

Even right now, disaster responses? All US mainland utilities are part of a emergency response pact (private, not government run) that obligates each other to send workers and equipment _at cost_ to each other. That's how things get fixed pretty quickly right now, they are depending on the supplies and labor of other utilities that weren't affected by the disaster.

That is far different than if the entire country is down.

A global disaster is very different from a local one. I suggest you review your faith in The Almighty We. Civilization has never been more fragile in history than it is now.

Japan after WWII recovered pretty fast even though the entire world had been set back a lot. Human knowledge is the key resource and electrical surges don't wipe that.

That's like saying the only limiting factor for the Titanic reaching New York is the big hole in the side of the boat.