The problem is, people make mistakes. All it takes is a crying child, a burned pot, a mistake in cooking (not thinking about it), and you've hit the wrong temp.
And then the pan is dangerous, leeching, trouble.
The whole thought about the approval was "Well, people can be trusted to not let a pot get too hot! And to know 100% to throw it away if it does!".
Right. Trusted. In a country with warning labels like 'coffee is hot' and 'water is wet'.
Edit: my point is, the above means "teflon isn't safe for home use". Engineers know, also, to have safety tolerances. For something like this, I'd expect the 'danger zone' to be 2x the max possible heat a consumer could apply by accident.
As burners can get crazy hot, that probably means I'd call teflon unsafe, unless it broke down at 2000F.
This is how we can approve things safe or not. Not "trust people will constantly monitor how hot their pan got".
Just as an aside, I was at a hotel the other day, and someone was trying to put buttered toast in the hotel toaster!
That seems a bit... unrealistic. Not even cast iron is usable at 2000F.
The actual danger temp, 260c / 500f, is trivially achievable on most home cooking equipment.
And even if the danger temp were 2,000 degrees, there would still be the major dangers from manufacturing and the associated pollution, as has been noted.
TikTok challenge...shave off some Teflon, burn it, and consume.
If they can ban gas stove like we saw in NY, they can ban these forever chemical utensils.
Then you turn off the cooking pot, and air the room. Burning teflon releases nasty stuff, but not much worse than burning oil. Unless you heat it up all the way until its thermal decomposition (your pan will be visibly glowing red at that temperature).
Also, it's time to switch from natural gas burners to electric stoves that can have automatic protection.