This pretty much sounds like the scenario used, successfully, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
When they wrote the rules did they just arbitrarily assign a carrier a certain number of attacks per round? Because four attacks doing d100 damage aren't like one-hundred attacks doing d4 damage...
If a real carrier group would have survived the attack then they should change the rules.
The closing speed makes the difference. Which is also complicated for the little boats on the probably rough open seas where they'd encounter the carrier group. Carrier groups travel in miles-wide formations. Even if your first warning was your support-ships getting hit you'd still have minutes to react to the incoming threats. Time to get multiple aircraft up, set the guns to the right mode for targeting ships, etc.
It sounds like its the result of arbitrary rules letting you to attack someone by moving into their hex, etc. I don't think you'd get this result with a real-world battle exercise, where soldiers had to drive the boats tens of miles off-coast in radio silence for a coordinated attack on a hyper-aware enemy.
but a great internet legend, brought up over and over again.
I would be very interested in evaluating a substantive claim that, rather than van Riper's surprise attack being outside the scope of the wargame but entirely plausible and effective all the same, a retired general with no personal stake in the outcome of the game nonetheless cheated in order to try to make it come out the way he wanted, despite that it'd be trivially obvious he'd done so.