At the same time, it appears that you could load all artificial objects in Earth’s orbit onto a single small container ship.

That is the objects that are big enough for us to track somewhat reliably (10cm+). Based on models produced by ESA's space debris office, it is estimated that there are 1 million objects between 1-10cm and an 130 million objects between 1mm to 1cm.

Only appears that way because of the size of the icons representing them (which at the base zoom level are kilometers wide). If it was drawn at real scale the objects would be insignificant.