If you take the Living Construct, the Texas-class ships(Yeah, I know, LD) and the Mars Utopia Planitia incident all happening fairly close together, it at least makes the seemingly sudden knee-jerk reaction about AI in Picard(Yeah, I know) a bit more understandable, in a human way. (Plus whatever the AI vault in LD is leading to, if it's used for anything more than a one-off joke.) And after what happened in the Living Construct incident basically being a Wolf 359 level event in terms of ship loss, considering this was during the evacuation fleet buildup, and then Mars, it really explains why the Federation was low on ships. And as for mothballed ships that they could reactivate, those probably got mostly scrapped during the Dominion War with how many Mirandas and Excelsiors were lost there.
Still dumb that they didn't keep trying anyways, but if all they had were just enough ships to keep things going internally and the other shipyards were busy building new ships to replace the ones lost here, they they wouldn't have had more than a token squadron to spare and they might have thought that'd be seen as an insult. (Or it was a convenient excuse to abandon them due to Undiscovered Country style attitudes against Romulans, as this basically was their Praxis.) The copy-paste fleet was probably literally pulled from just completed construction too at a nearby shipyard or shakedown area, taking all this into account, as an explanation for why it existed rather than the usual mixed fleet.