[strainer]

I don't believe its a big problem to either professional or amateur astronomy, but rather a publicity controversy acting on fears that night skies will be visibly tainted. The satellites are not visible to naked eyes, 240 have already been launched and no number of them can degrade dark skies as 'scare articles' suggest. Amateur astronomers may find they will appear rather too commonly in views and they may leave bothersome trails on non-digitally corrected exposures, but a very tiny percentage of people are in any position to be impacted by that (purely aesthetically).

Most of our skies both audibly and visibly feature large aircraft and contrail clouds - invisible satellites and the aesthetics of a few astronomers are of zero concern to most people. The frank reality is astronomers don't actually have any right to telescopically 'clear skies' - not even the masses have audibly and optically clear skies.

[Waterluvian]

It is so so hard to give people a real grokking sense of scales of things. It's so easy to look at a satellite map and think, "wow look at that pollution!"

Until we get better at understanding scale, it'll always be so easy to exploit human fear.