Imagine if humanity ending is not because we cannot exit the planet that we have destroyed for a better one, but because we’ve also polluted earths orbit so much that it becomes impossible to escape.
The above is a consequence of physics and not an opinion. Even if we discover "new physics" it still needs to fit all the data we have and so that is unlikely to help.
Also your space station suffers the same lifetime issues of a generation ship: it will decay over time, so you still are dependent on earth (or at least a planet) to provide resources.
That's a 1975 design using quite conservative 1950s tech - lots of bulk steel and aluminium with unprocessed Lunar regolith for shielding.
I guess that's the nature of internet arguments.
But that tether will have to lift the entire weight of your ship, plus a share of its own weight. The longer you make it, the heavier it will be, and you get a problem similar to a space elevator, and before you get to city-sized, it seems to require exotic materials already.
The choice of materials impose a maximum size for any design that rotates as a whole.
The elites will send their art collection to space before the poor
It'd also be interesting if what gets sent to space is an SQL database which most important table has the columns account_owner, account_balance..