ELI5 Flight Delays - how do airports manage major disruptions such as weather cancellations?

When flights get cancelled because of heavy winds, why is it only a proportion of flights and not 100% that stop? Isn’t it a binary decision of: 'safe' or 'too dangerous'? After weather cancels thousands of flights and lots of people are displaced, how to they all get back on schedule when presumably flights for the next few days are already booked up?

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