That NEOWISE photo was 17 photos deliberately stacked to emphasise the problem rather than minimise it, so it's not really a fair datapoint. Astrophotograhy stacking software will generally remove items that don't appear in all photos in the stack rather than retain them (previous discussion on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926699). That said, I love taking photos of the night sky myself and had some Starlink satellites affect a single exposure photo of mine recently, so it is a real issue - just not quite as crazy as it looks from that photo.