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Even if all the electricity for EVs came from a centralized coal plant (it doesn't) it would be better than using combustion in individual vehicles. Centralized pollution in one area is better than attempting to mitigate diffuse pollution everywhere.

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Coal power plants are also massively more efficient than ICE cars. They can run consistently at their optimum rpm rather than start stop usage.

One other decent argument I heard in favor of EVs is that they’re agnostic to where that power is generated. So once that coal plant is replaced with natural gas, solar, wind, or whatever, all the EVs in that area will instantly become cleaner without everyone having to buy a new car after the changes is made.

This is the key. It basically makes existing EVs retroactively more green.

On the other hand you can't do that with combustion vehicles, trying to legislate more environmental regulations to existing cars is political suicide.

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