It's not taboo, it's just basic antropo-ecological mechanics: if you don't focus on growth the other who will and will do more of it will outcompete you out of every niche. So selective pressure will increase the number of growth focused civilizations comparative to others.
We actually need more growth and we need to think outside of nature's and Earth's box... We have the technology to practice closed-circle-agriculture and that only needs power (more nuclear + more renewables) + raw materials (more extraction, more oil but less of it burnt as a fuel), let's just forget about maintaining the "natural balance" and put serious research work into techniques for manipulating and tweaking so called chaotic systems... There absolutely no reason why Earth can't support even a 10 trillion humans population if we just quit on "nature" (keep it just in small reservations), and go full nuclear (imagine 1+ billion reactors!) and fully embrace semi-synthetic food (sure, first iterations on sythetic proteins were carcinogenic as hell, but we know how to solve such problems now, or how to avoid them with bugs and closed-circuit-shrimps and lab-grown-meats etc.).
Yeah, a couple tens of millions might die of extra cancers and other pollution induced illnesses, but we can compensate by accelerating population growth (baby factories/camps can work if campaigns to motivate people to reproduce more don't work - though I'd guess we're good enough at the technology of brainwashing and economic incentivization by now to make masses of people do anything if we put our best efforts into....).
We just need a solid serious global responsibility frameworks instead of our anemic "globalism", so that if anyone just dumps X tons of eg. mercury in the ocean, they don't receive just sanctions but also swift targeted assassinations of all guilty parties +/- a sprinkle of tactical nukes for good measure and punishment against "pissing in the pool"...