5G seems to me like planned obsolesence of 4G with only an incremental improvement. 4G was supposed to be "Long-Term Evolution". I had thought that meant forward- and backward-compatibility for decades. Granted, latency is much lower. Did I get taken by marketing?

With 6G deployment already being projected, when I don't even know anybody with a 5G handset, it also seems like a make-work technology.

Deployment of a new wireless technology throughout a national wireless carrier, let alone all carriers in a country the size of the US, or in the world, is such a huge undertaking in terms of environmental resources, that it seems almost irresponsible unless there is a significant improvement.

2G was a quantum leap over 1G analog networks. In 2G networks like GSM, the digital communications stack was so tightly integrated, and as optimized as a 1990s video game, that even everyday layman users knew stories like "I could send an emergency SMS from the middle of nowhere even when there was no signal". It seems like that kind of robustness is missing the more abstract and higher-level these wireless generations go.