The issue is not plants vs animals. It's the messaging and misinformation around "plant/animal-based" terminology. People align very strongly one way or the other because of an intersection of morality with strongly held cultural beliefs. Then they advocate, one way or the other, and fund studies designed to show their outcomes. Food is a space very, very fraught with intentional misinformation.

This fundamentally ignores a bunch of realities around land quality, thermodynamics, and nutrition bio-availability.

Generally what's wrong with (everything in the nutrtition and fitness space) that the terms are overloaded to mean whatever it is the person speaking it deems at the time. Example: Paul Saladino (carnivoreMD) touts an animal based diet. Then when you dig into what he really recommends for eating is animal products + fruits and plants that have limited defense chemicals that can cause (for some people) disruptions in their life.

The position i advocate for is regenerative agriculture where we sequester more carbon by using the animals to mimic the natural grazing cycles and provide fertilizer for plants. This is incredibly important because in order to produce crop yields like we do, we require massive amounts of fertilizer, which requires petroleum inputs to create which gets us back to thermodynamics. To do crop rotation appropriately in a sustainable way, you need ruminant animals.

It's a complex topic that I invite everyone to spend some time taking a look at because there's really big money in meat production as well as artificial meat production that have a vested interest in winning you over.