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Isn’t it still a problem as all these cars classified as trucks no longer have to meet car emissions and safety standards?

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They're all sold in Europe, where they're legally cars, meet car safety standards and fuel consumption is usually only slightly worse, about the amount you'd expect from raising a hatchback body 1-2 inches.

The layout also has obvious advantages for EVs, although Tesla does manage a sedan form factor. They are meaningfully different from "Jesus Christ I may have just killed a child whilst parking, because I am driving something doing a decent impersonation of the industrial equipment normally associated with an open-cast quarry".

I'm not sure what you mean. In California, at least, they do. But different states have different laws w.r.t. emission standards.

The poster you are responding to is referring to misdesigned Obama-era CAFE efficiency standards, which created an incentive for companies to build bigger, heavier cars and classify them as light trucks or SUVs, because the customers did not like the cars that met the norms for the “car” classification. This is very much a federal issue.

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