On cost-effectiveness, a single F-16A is worth about 350 Stingers. Can't do much with one F-16, so bring that up to say 24, if you get drivers, and that is a lot of stingers. And I like the F-16. Flying around Tyndall when they did the first F-16 drone shoots was depressing, it was bad enough watching F-4s get used as drones.
The more interesting issue is that Ukraine has lost a fair number of aircraft, not that many less than the invaders. They have suppressed air activity, but so has the limited number of S-300s and the more prevalent MANPADS. The Ukraine FIR is not a healthy place to be, well at least for Ka-52 and SU-34 drivers.
F-16 or similar aircraft offer an opportunity to take some interdiction into Russia's supply chain, however, as incompetent as F-Troop has been so far, they have enough stuff to toss at strike packages to make that expensive. Some merit for ALCM, and ARM, when well within their own turf, but any flight that they go on will be effectively wild weasel no matter what it was fragged as.
Have both, nothing wrong with system redundancy, but I would be expecting more effect from rat cunning asymmetric postures, using cruise missiles, MANPADS at every opportunity, and gallons of ATWs, not even only smart ones.
With respect to the SBS position on the allied bombing, it seemed to be myopic and to have a bias towards a political statement rather than a balance of factors. The fact that accuracy was low on daylight and night bombing did not account for the amount of effort that was required by the other side to defend against the attacks. That strained resources, and put equipment into areas away from where they could have otherwise been used. Much as the odd occasional media story results in re-allocation of systems as a threat awareness arises. Who is to say whether a threat is actually any less effective than an action, depends on what the objective was. Harris was treated poorly by his own country, and that is still a matter to be rectified.
A few squadrons of F-22 and F-35 would be nice, their life expectancy would be OK in the air, just being on the ground would be unhealthy.