In any debate around whether the carriers have "skewed" the fleet, it needs to be remembered that the current official UK intention is to be able to operationally deploy one carrier at any given time - not two. The rationale behind the decision to maintain two vessels was to ensure the availability of one high readiness carrier at all times. Without the second vessel, the refit cycle would mean a single carrier being available to deploy for only around 5 years out of every eight.
So the current escort fleet is built around escorting a single carrier group and as far as I know there has never been an intention to do more than that. The UK has 14 "high end" escorts (6 x T45 and 8 x towed-sonar T23) and the intention is to accompany the carrier with two of each type whenever it's deployed to a high risk area.
That really should be readily possible with 14 high end escorts. In fact for short term "surges" it should be possible to generate more than 4. And that's without factoring in the other 5 general purpose T23s (to be replaced by T31s) and the 5 new 90 metre OPVs, which between them can cover a range of "other" tasking.
None of which is to say that the RN doesn't need more escorts - it does. And the MoD does need to sort manning out so that the RN can fully utilise the assets it already has. But manpower problems aside, which result from policy decisions unrelated to the carriers, the argument that the RN can't escort a carrier, or can't do that while doing other things at the same time - doesn't really stack up.
It's only when we start assuming that the RN will routinely operate both carriers concurrently that things get tight - but as I say that is not (yet) the officially stated intention, as far as I'm aware.
I think it's acknowledged that there is the potential to operate both carriers at the same time in extremis - but as has been said, in such serious circumstances we'd be prioritising fairly fiercely anyway.