Along with the elimination of leaded gasoline, it serves as proof of successful mutual cooperation as a species, something people often claim is impossible or we have no examples of.
The fact that it became as impactful as it was is also illustrative of two things;
1. Consistent Failure to recognize and then capture global scale high impact externalities prior to harm for consumer products
2. Law of unintended consequences due to lack of holism in the design process (related to the above, lack of incentives to be holistic)
My argument is that Cybernetics being killed in the crib has made human life structurally worse, as the engineering discipline without holism, ignores the causal impact of ignoring systemic inputs - because it slows people down, is hard and doesn't meet "bottom line" demands which are the priority for capital markets funding these types of developments.