You're not arguing in a way that strikes me as intellectually honest.
You're hypothesizing the existence of large negative effects with minimal evidence.
But the positive effects of plastics and social media are extremely well understood and documented. Plastics have revolutionized practically every industry we have.
With that kind of pattern of evidence, I think it makes sense to discount the negatives and be sure to account for all the positives before saying that deploying the technology was a bad idea.