The pandemic difficulties are hitting harder at small airports and those without a lot of flight alternatives. We've flown.... stops to count... a total of 16 flight segments since things started reopening in fall of 2020 and haven't had any major problems. Minor schedule changes and some shorter or longer layovers than we initially booked, but nothing seriously disruptive. DD20 has also flown another 10 times either to or from school since the start of the pandemic, most of those trips with one stop. She did run into two big snafus - her flight home when the dorms closed in March 2020 was impacted by the covid outbreak in Chicago air traffic control, and her flight back to school in August 2021 was during one of Spirit's major cancellation events. The former was a real hassle because everything was closing down and changing so quickly; she was able to get home without spending more, but it involved sleeping a night in the Denver airport on the first of two layovers and eating dinner from a vending machine because food service was also disrupted. The second was only a minor headache; I paid to rebook her on a flight that wasn't cancelled to get her back to campus on time for her RA training and Spirit eventually refunded the difference. It took them about 8 weeks, but it did all work out in the end. That's the advantage of flying out of a very busy hub airport - when DD's 5am flight was cancelled, there were other flights leaving at 7am, 9am, noon, etc. and some did have empty seats.
We used to fly out of a much smaller airport that is more convenient to our house but stopped even before the pandemic because of the infrequency of flights. If a scheduled flight from there is cancelled, it could be a day or two before the next one, and after a friend lost three days of a week's vacation that way, I decided the Detroit airport was worth the hassle after all.
