Agreed. I actually googled a few other sites with this type info before submitting, and this site had the fewest ads / most straight forward text based info. I’m sure if I spend another ten mins I could find a better site. If anyone else has some links that’d be awesome.
There was a pretty interesting TED talk on this subject that includes how they used indoor plants to help clear up the air at an office building in India.
This advice is akin to saying you can improve your car's fuel economy by turning off the air conditioning - technically true, but with an effect size so tiny as to make it pointless. On average, a human would need several trees to produce enough oxygen to sustain them indefinitely. That probably works out to hundreds of house plants.
I was looking at it more from a point of supplementing the oxygen already in the atmosphere and, importantly, scrubbing my apartment air of some of these other molecules. I don’t think that “you’ll never have a fully functioning biosphere so this is dumb” is a legit counter argument.
My argument wasn't that it's impossible to fully support a human with oxygen from houseplants. The point is that the oxygen output of a single houseplant, or even a dozen of them, is negligible relative to the oxygen consumption of even a single human. That doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons to own a houseplant, it just means that oxygen production isn't one of them.