Firstly, I want to apologize for the tone of my previous reply; I could, and should, have made the main point - that this is no longer the chain model Veritasium was speaking of - in one short paragraph.

Beyond that, I think there is an issue here in the relationship between analogy and explanation.

If we draw an analogy between two different phenomena, we have not, at that point, explained either. If the analogy is between one phenomenon we understand, and one that we do not, it does not follow that the explanation for the former also explains the latter; that is an additional premise that has to be justified independently. It may be that the analogy points us towards a justification, but we cannot assume that.

Analogies can also be helpful as what Daniel Dennett calls 'intuition pumps' - a point of view that may help us form intuitions about what is going on (they can also pump incorrect intuitions, however, so we have to be careful.) With regard to electricity, there was a time when it just seemed impossible to me that AC could send power to a distant lamp or motor, and the chain analogy helped me get around that block (I sometimes wonder if Edison, who held a strong and largely irrational antipathy towards AC, could have benefitted from it!)

This analogy gives useful intuitions with regard to simple DC and low-frequency AC circuitry, but it rapidly breaks down if we try to push it too far. The simple analogy fails as soon as we get to transformers, for example.

At this point, we might be tempted to patch it up this way: imagine that the chain drives a sprocket, which in turn drives a second sprocket with a different number of teeth, which is moving a second chain.

There are several problems with this, such as there being no obvious reason for conflating the transformer turns ratio with the sprockets' teeth ratio, and that, taken as an explanation, it implies that transformers work for DC. Furthermore, it is just an ad-hoc patch to the chain-loop 'theory' of electricity.

Maybe you can come up with something that avoids the second of these problems (e.g. use a lever instead of sprockets), and perhaps even the first (but if you go with the lever, now you have added the problem of why a lever but not gears), but the third will always be there - as it is in the increasingly complex models you have presented in this discussion. The fundamental problem is that there is no analog, in the mechanics of matter (including acoustics), to the interaction between electric and magnetic fields in the vacuum.

There is an interesting historical connection here: I am told that as Maxwell struggled with EM, he filled his notebooks with many mechanical models, having space filled with tiny gears meshing with one another, but they did not make it into the theory. They seemed to have served as intuition pumps, or as a Wittgenstein's ladder - a sort of scaffolding that gets you to where you are going, but which you can throw away once you are there - though physics did not completely abandon the luminiferous aether until Einstein's theory of special relativity showed it to be unnecessary.

In this light, I take the argument in Veritasium's video to be structured this way: the chain model (i.e. the simple one, in which the links stand for electrons) breaks down for more complex situations, such as what happens in the first second of his proposed experiment. In EM theory, however, there is a construct - the Poynting vector - which shows the flow of energy and which is completely general, providing a single unified picture of what is going on in all cases. It works for the first second of the experiment as well as the cases where the chain analogy is an effective intuition pump, such as the steady state of the experiment. Thus I, personally, have no problem with Veritasium saying that it is a strictly better explanation than the chain model, and also than your ad-hoc additions and alternatives to it (though he did not, of course, take any position on those.)

One other point: the transmission-line model itself contains an analogy, between the distributed properties of the line and a circuit of discrete components. In that case, however, the discrete model was developed, by Heaviside, rigorously from first principles, so we know it can be used in explaining what is going on. That is how you do analogies that will serve as explanations!

Finally, here's an insightful essay by Freeman Dyson, entitled "Why is Maxwell's Theory so hard to understand?"

https://www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/DysonFreemanArticle.p...