Technology and scale made it so that boot story actually comes out in favor of the person buying and replacing cheap boots.
I think fast fashion is pretty awful, all around. Clothes are cheaper than ever (great!), but we're also buying more, lower-quality, more wasteful clothes than ever.
(One of the things that fascinates me about this trend is how bimodal the apparel market is: a reasonable but naive assumption is that economies of scale would also lower the cost for clothes made from nicer textiles - especially when manufactured in the same locations - but instead anything that's "nicer" than low-weight cotton gets a quality tax.)
A few pairs of darn toughs, ridge merino base layers and well made denim will last you a decade. Also unless you're exercising in them hardly needs any washing. Just doesn't smell. Ymmv
Can't imagine wearing all that polyester and acrylic crap. Doesn't feel good, doesn't look good, doesn't last, and yeah microplastics.
The “conclusion” was that people looking for the cheapest stuff are going to inevitably buy at the cheapest end, provoking a race to the bottom for manufacturers. People who like brands, quality, or status will go to the high end, independent of price, creating incentives for the companies to just sell things more expensively for a higher margin. There just wasn’t (according to the comments) enough market mass (nor business interest) to cater for that middle spot that ironically so many of us are looking for.
If you ignore the externalities. Extending the analogy, the boot story comes out in favor of buying cheap boots AND the persons' grandchildren have to struggle against ecological challenges they did not create and only tangentially benefit from.