You're just saying "it's worked before, it should work again" as an argument. This is complete garbage.
China is a great example of this if you want to look into their demographic information
That means that an order-of-magnitude increase in consumption, which would trivially happen is all of the earth's existing population were to have first-world consumption standards, would completely wipe away a sustainable society.
As far as I know, order-of-magnitude reductions in consumption of basic resources while keeping living standards is not something we are anywhere remotely close to achieving.
A good example of this is the technology cycle of the oil industry. In the 20th century, the primary extraction method for oil was tapping shallow, high pressure oil reservoirs. Oil riggers would drill down less than 1000 feet and oil would come gushing out. As the shallow pockets ran out, the oil industry lamented because they approached a perceived resource constraint. Shortly thereafter, it was found that there was an order of magnitude more proven oil reserves deeper down.
I think society is at a similar nexus today. We're at an inflection point between the end of a lot of steep growth curves (oil and gas production, population growth, [possibly] economic development in the West) and the beginning of a lot of new ones (replacing oil with sustainable energy sources, material science, bioengineering, nanotechnology, space exploration). In all of those realms, it's painfully clear that we're a far ways away from the extent of available resources.
Let's consider artificial energy consumption by humans today. In total, humanity consumed ~500 PWh in 2019 [1]. Power flux of the earth is 173 PW; annualized, earth's energy flux is ~15 million PWh. That means that we consume 0.003% of the energy that is incident the earth. Clearly we're not getting close to the fixed resources of the earth.
In this view, global warming and resource consumption are still existential concerns, but we are working against perceived limits rather than today's physical limits. Humans are really good at making technology that increases the exploitable resources at our disposal. I'm relatively confident that we'll build technology to save us from extinction, but perhaps not from societal collapse.
[1] I summed the consumption from 2019 in the spreadsheet available here: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?country=USA~GBR~...
And in the context of resource extraction, it comes at the cost of a reduction in biomass and biodiversity. It is a laughable claim that we are anywhere remotely close to working towards, let alone reverse, the damage we've done to the biosphere.
Human population is definitely not growing exponentially either.
Right now it does. GDP growth and resource use have been demonstrated to be pretty tightly coupled, so if economic growth is exponential so is resource use, afaik. It's worth noting that energy is also a resource; it is really hard to de-couple productivity from energy usage.
Check out this article, and Figure 1 specifically: https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/growth-without-econom...
Total non-renewable energy use seems set to peak soon. Even ignoring tech improvements, economic growth comes from services, which means trading imaginary things between each other.