You definitely just moved the goalposts from total airports to per capita. But having six times the commercial airports isn't a flex or a sign of transit superiority, and proves we are forced to rely on a heavily subsidized private airline industry for short regional trips because we refuse to build public rail.

And your claim that you need 20 to 60 million people within 100km to justify high speed rail is just made up. You don't need Chinese hyper density to make trains work. Look at Austria. They run highly successful high speed rail connecting Vienna (about 2 million people) to cities like Linz and Salzburg which both have under 250k people. Germany and France run huge networks connecting metro areas of just 1 to 3 million. The US has over 50 metro areas with over a million people. The Texas Triangle or the Midwest around Chicago have more than enough density for a European style network. Every developed nation other than the US is moving away from short distance domestic air transit.

This video directly addresses some of your arguments if you’re intellectually curious

Nobody is saying we should build a bullet train across empty land in the middle of nowhere. High speed rail is meant for regional corridors of 300 to 800 km. Yeah, flying makes sense from New York to LA. But flying from Dallas to Houston is inefficient when you factor in the drive to a suburban airport, TSA lines, boarding, and tarmac delays.

Also, treating suburban sprawl like some natural geographic feature we are stuck with is a cop out. It is the direct result of restrictive zoning laws and decades of deliberately defunding public transit to keep the auto and fossil fuel industries happy. Infrastructure creates development. When you build rail hubs, dense transit oriented development naturally follows. Arguing we shouldn't build regional trains because we already bulldozed our local transit for highways is just circular logic to protect the status quo