Without having watched the replay there are two, maybe two and a half, things people conveniently ignore when they say just kite.
The biggest: if there was a large naval battle there could be literally hundreds of thousands of mass sitting where you need to kite away from. Congrats, enemy gets that mass and you’re now massively down overall.
Next, though closely related: You can’t kite forever. Sometimes you have to defend some area and just can’t back up more. This also means the enemy, unless they’re cybran and can’t abuse this, can keep their base and stave off land invasion with massive hover spam for longer than they should be able to.
The half reason: sad cybran destroyer noises
Again, I didn’t watch the replay. I just dislike the “just kite” argument, I’ve seen really good players, including top setoners, lose games because hover. Admittedly, it’s due to pretty niche scenarios that cause that and part of it is just depression, but still.
The hard part about hover isn’t that it wins mass for mass, pretty sure it doesn’t. The winning part with hover is that you can have massive dps concentrations with it that you can’t get with ships because they’re bigger. Navy also often massively overkills the hover which helps the hover quite a bit.