My comment is borderline off topic, but I just can leave it at that. Sorry.
> I think it’s apt because the Ship of Theseus as a thought experiment is unanswerable.
It is answerable, you just need to go meta a little. You can argue that the Ship of Theseus doesn't exist (and didn't existed) because it is just a lot of wood. You can use reductionism further and say that wood doesn't exist, it is a bunch of atoms or quarks or whatever. The ship is just a leaky abstraction people are forced use because of their cognitive limitations. But if it is an abstraction, not a "real" thing, then I see no issues with the ship existing (in a limited sense) even after it changed all the atoms it consists of.
The other approach is to declare that a ship is not a thing, but a process. Like you do when talking about people, who change their atoms all the time, but they still keep they identity in a "magical" way. If you see people as a process, then it doesn't matter how often it replaces its matter with another matter. Like a tornado, which exists while exchanging matter with environment all the time and still being the same tornado. Or like a wave on a water surface, it doesn't have any atoms moving like a wave, but still a wave exists.
> It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways.
It doesn't matter if there any old parts left, what matters is a continuous history.
> But is it the same ship?
It is the same ship, but its properties are changing over time. Like when people become older, some of them become wiser for example, some become physically weaker.
> But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
Yeah, with this I can fully agree. BTW we don't know was the Ship of Theseus becoming better or worse after repairs, but I'd bet that its maximum speed was changing due to repairs.