technology

That's a very fair point, but the ratio of wounded to dead casualties ranges from 3:1 historically to 10:1 in the most optimistic modern scenarios. The US claims 7(?) dead and Iran's numbers at that point would maybe be 50~ dead. Hiding 50 dead is harder than hiding 7 dead. My hospital's morgue could fit five corpses before you had to jump over them to get to the one you needed, and it was large compared to most military ones. For Iran's claim to be true I would need to see some kind of non-Iranian confirmation with the photos of moving that many wounded or dead people. It's a logistical challenge that should be evident from the number of medevac flights going back to the US, and at least so far I haven't seen that personally.

If I saw a photo of the laundry room on the USS Gerald R. Ford I'd believe that as conclusively as if I saw scorch marks on the side of it, but I have to be agnostic in the absence of either and lean toward Occam's razor. It's easier to fuck up a laundry vent than it is to penetrate multiple layers of screening ships that exist to stop things from hitting a carrier. The one thing the US Navy orients its entire fleet defense around is protecting carriers, so it's the target in the entire region which is most hardened against attack. It isn't invulnerable and I expect one to be hit by a hypersonic missile at some point, but I need hard proof before I believe the thing that would benefit me the most to believe.