> generally viewed as good for both producers and consumers
How so? All examples of price discrimination I can think of are basically forms of rent seeking where money is extracted without providing anything in return.
Price discrimination is basically a tax levvied by the rich-powerful-and-better-informed entities of the world over the rich-but-powerless-and-poorly-informed.
For example, people who gladly pay premia for organic/green/ethical products while accepting any and all claims about the product actually being organic/green/ethical at face value are, to me, rich-but-poorly-informed.
Private health insurance in Germany is another good example: The cost of the service they're providing is mostly driven by insanely expensive therapies, like cancer treatment or dialysis, that you may or may not ever need. The catalogue of such services that insurance needs to cover is prescribed by law with only very minor deviations permissible, so you'd expect that premia for different insurance products are in a very narrow range. Not so. One such permissible small deviation is coverage of single-bed rooms during hospital stays versus five-bed rooms. That's financially just small change. But the premia for single-bed often cost as much as twice (or even more) as the entry-level premia. The folk who pay them, to me, are simply poorly informed. They don't work through the math of getting the low premium while paying for the single-bed room out of pocket.
A third example: This one is more about situational power than it is about smarts. If there are multiple different modes of transport and railway companies competing to provide transport in a given country, market forces will lead to an equilibrium price for rail transport. This is the price after deduction of the discount you get from the rail card. A tourist however, can't hand in an application for a rail card at the station and wait for 2 weeks for the card to arrive in the mail. So they have to pay full price, without the discount for the railway card. That premium is basically a form of rent seeking, where the rail company extracts a higher price from the tourist, merely because they have the power to do so, and without providing anything of value in return. A plain-and-simple form of rent-seeking. Economically as destructive as can be.