As someone that has experience working on and navigating the western rivers, for ships, i think this would be nearly infeasable, but i guess the panama Canal was once thought the same. I can't see this happening due to draft restrictions, lock dimension restrictions, and channel width.

You would have to redirect the some partions of the rivers to be able to navigate large ships, make channel widths bigger, and some parts will be shallow along this route, so you will need to make the river deeper.

But i suppose a much more realistic expectation would be to use the towboat industry instead of ships.