My grandma has lived in Yakima, WA (major apple producer) for 80+ years and tells me all the time that the red delicious used to be a good apple, but was changed with the goal of being prettier, but lost flavor/texture.

Even the article you linked agrees:

"But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh. "

Using the term 'chemicals' is too broad. Chemicals includes the water you drink. And the issue is that when you teach people 'chemicals are bad' then anyone else can say 'this is a chemical' and get people to avoid it, even when there is no need to, such as the anti-vaccine movement saying vaccines 'contain chemicals'. It's hard to refute that because yes, they do contain chemicals. The problem is that 'chemicals' were the wrong thing to be taking issue with.

Criticising a process for using a 'toxic gas' without any of the nuance of what the gas is being used for and what the properties and toxicity of the gas are and if they're relevant is just as illiterate and dangerous, and should be challenged when you see it.

Reminds me of "organic pesticides" being treated as rhetorically as safer because they are easier to understand despite it being the exact opposite and including heavy metals. They are broad mechanism toxins that effect essentially everything organic while synthetics are tailored to do things like disrupt very specific proteins that aren't even found in the vertabrates - much less humans themselves. Preferring known dangerous heavy metals over a remote possibility that something far safer and biodegradable that /might/ have something unknown is FUD just as sure as a known embezzler running for reelection saying his opponent might raise taxes.