CO was asleep, and new to the ship, which makes it seem a bit unfair to hold him accountable but "the buck stops here" applies. The commanding officer is always ultimately responsible for anything that happens on/to his ship. You really have to wonder what the people on the bridge were doing and thinking. It's dangerous to guess, but I'll take a try and guess that they didn't want to change course to go astern of the freighter so they tried to scoot by in front -- and didn't quite make it. Like all those videos on Youtube of people in cars who thought they could beat a train at a rail crossing ...
People don't tend to try and cowboy with ships even Naval Officers. Maybe especially Naval Officers.
As silly as it sounds I'd bet quite a bit that they didn't see each other. That's how these investigation overwhelmingly turn out. There were quite a bit of other lights on the horizon, and in the area. There was brightly lit up land behind at least one of them. It's a lot harder than you think to judge distance at night, and it's sometimes pretty difficult to make out what light goes to what ship. That's why they make us practice quite a bit. I routinely, while underway, will point out a set of lights to my watchstander, tell them it's a ship XXX feet long, and ask how far away it is. Then we'll go look at the RADAR. Most are off by a mile or two at night.
As far as electronic aids, it could be as simple as having a RADAR in True Motion mode instead of Relative Motion mode. Or they ran the collision avoidance solution, liked the answer, and the other ship turned or changed speed. Or someone just got locked into another target on the other side of the vessel and forgot to check 360. It's stupid in hindsight, but happens. Actual RADARs are less cut and dry than you'd think. there's a lot of dots, some are boats, some aren't. Some can be tracked automatically, some need to be tracked old fashioned way. I still drill my watch officers on how to do grease pencil plots directly on the screen and get collision avoidance solutions.
Someone (or several someone's) got careless and complacent but I'd be pretty shocked if they made a choice to play chicken. That's what idiot fisherman do, not watch officers on large ships.