THIS^^
Been there, done that. This is the first conclusion I came to. To your point Larry, the part of the arresting gear that goes across the deck is called the pennant and is replaceable. There are changed out every 100 traps, but very, very rarely, they don’t make it that far and fail.
The jet doesn’t stall, it has just doesn’t have enough energy to get back in the air even at 100% power so it settles into the drink off the angle deck. There are PLAT camera videos on YouTube show what happens. There is one video of an E2-C Hawkeye just making it back into the air.