It is so incredibly wasteful that the companies and governments keep coming up with unique designs for the satellites serving similar purposes. Imagine if we had a standard design template for an optical telescope that could be cheaply and easily mass produced and launched by the thousands.
Common satellite chassis has been a thing for decades. StarLink and other systems like it benefit from mass production and economies of scale. Each block of StarLink satellites is identical. They also have a singular task and everything about them is optimized for it.
Most satellites are not identical copies of one another even if they have "similar" roles. Mass production is less desirable as you'd end up with unoptimized designs which means wasted mass or reduced capabilities.
It's relatively inexpensive for SpaceX to do it, but their external prices are still quite high, even if cheaper than the competition.
The resulting arms race would be... interesting and would probably get us closer to Kessler Syndrome quickly.
The consequences for pollution from other industries is usually longer term and less dramatic/direct on the business itself, if it even effects the core business directly.
I think all the effort put into monitoring space debris and the amount of attention things like starlink is getting speaks to this.
They're at 550km up. From https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm puts it at likely a 10 year lifespan with some variation. The published lifespan of a satellite is 5 years.
Its the stuff in the 700km to 900km range that's a problem.
https://www.satview.org/spacejunk.php - and you'll see things like STARLINK-1204 already getting deorbtied ( https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=45203 - note its perigee is 204.0 km - its already well below the other orbits)
https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45203 for more on that satellite.
Starlink-61 appears to be one of the oldest ones still in orbit - https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44249 though its on its way down and you can see the type of impact and the duration of the "ok, this is going down".
Even with the maximum starlink, that's 1,700 satellites that will last about 10 years.
The 2007 China anti-satellite test created approximately 150,000 debris at 865km. Those are in an orbit that is on the order of 500 years.
Starlink isn't going to be the cause of Kessler Syndrome.
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In hunting this up, I also found https://planet4589.org/astro/starsim/index.html which is relevant to the main topic - the impact on astronomy.
A more natural one is https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45229 which has the same initial orbit pattern.
The key thing with this is that without anything else, the satellite has a lifespan that is measured in months to years and up to a decade... not centuries. A Kessler syndrome at 550km would certainly be rather up there on the "suck" scale, but wouldn't keep humanity grounded for more than a decade.
One of the important things to remember about debris at a given altitude, without additional energy, an object cannot climb further out of the the gravity well into a higher orbit. It will always come back to the same spot in its orbit one orbital period later.