I agree with your point that this article does use a lot anecdotes and not enough strong evidence to back up the terrifying conclusions it suggests and throws around "may" quite a bit.
I will say though, that similar to investigations on microplastics exposure and health impacts, it can be prohibitively difficult to really have "rigorous statistics" or fully control in studies when it's become so ubiquitous in nearly every environment and when the exact types of pollutants people are exposed to can be very hard to quantify. For any of the more complex compounds it will be very hard to discern what aspect of it causes what exact health outcomes. For example, with microplastics its nearly impossible to find any population without exposure to or detectable amounts of microplastics in their bodies, meaning fully controlling for it in the stats is not possible. The types of plastics people are exposed to can also be very difficult to quantify meaningfully as they don't all accumulate in our tissues and as a result it can be difficult to quantity the actual exposures people have to what pollutants, short of some very unethical experiment designs.
Yes, and maybe we should start doing the science before we make stuff ubiquitous in our environments, rather than trying to figure stuff out after the fact. Leaded gasoline is an example where it took us a long time to understand the effects, and we'll never really be able to quantify the damage caused. And the data you get later from phasing something out at a systemic level gives you only a kind of crude single crossover result, with lots of potential confounding variables. Why did crime in the US decrease in the 90s? We can't be sure.
I'm not saying microplastics are like lead of course. Just that in some cases, we're pretty sure we've caused a lot of damage by filling our environment without sufficient advance consideration.
Yeah it's a really tough problem with no clear answers.
Microplastics and other pollutants with potential long-acting health impacts are very hard to predict far in advance. Strong evidence for or against any adverse health effects would take considerable effort to gather while in the mean time they offers such clear advantages and solve so many problems. Plastics have massively reduced costs in almost every industry and have become almost irreplaceable in some applications such as medical equipment (think packaging for syringes, surgical tools, or anything that requires contamination control).
With lead there were viable cost-effective alternatives, it wasn't in nearly every product we consume, and we already had pretty clear evidence that its highly toxic so the only evidence needed was to show that the low levels being used in gasoline, while not acutely toxic, could be harmful given enough exposure to it over time.
I doubt anyone working on plastics early on anticipated microplastics would end up in nearly all of our food, living spaces, and even build up in our bodies. By the time there would be any alarm bells sounding, it would've been too late, the sheer number and ways it solves problems makes it far too difficult to retreat from when, due to the nature of how its potential effects could arise, wouldn't give any strong evidence that its harmful.
Outside of plastics many air pollutants are similar in that manner. The processes that release them are so convenient and solve so many problems, while any health effects would be long-term and extremely difficult to gather strong evidence for.
I will say though, that similar to investigations on microplastics exposure and health impacts, it can be prohibitively difficult to really have "rigorous statistics" or fully control in studies when it's become so ubiquitous in nearly every environment and when the exact types of pollutants people are exposed to can be very hard to quantify. For any of the more complex compounds it will be very hard to discern what aspect of it causes what exact health outcomes. For example, with microplastics its nearly impossible to find any population without exposure to or detectable amounts of microplastics in their bodies, meaning fully controlling for it in the stats is not possible. The types of plastics people are exposed to can also be very difficult to quantify meaningfully as they don't all accumulate in our tissues and as a result it can be difficult to quantity the actual exposures people have to what pollutants, short of some very unethical experiment designs.