You consider a few thousand satellites hundreds of miles above the surface of the earth to be litter, but the existing network of cables is beneath your notice? The internet is a web of copper, plastic, and glass that literally touches every place on Earth. It’s like a fungus that grows beneath our feet and over our heads.
I think you might be surprised just how many electronic devices have to be installed along that cable for it to function. All of those devices have to be replaced regularly. If you keep your eyes open, you can see them all over the city you live in. Big grey metal cabinets on every block, some of them under a metal cover that hundreds of people walk over every day without a second thought, others disguised with artwork. Anonymous concrete buildings scattered all over, some of them disguised as houses or businesses. Some of this infrastructure is needed for each customer, and some of it needed per mile. Rural customers need a lot more of the latter type. And all of it is delivered and installed using gasoline or diesel. And it all has to be replaced far more often than the cables themselves. The modem you have in your house is functionally obsolete after just a few years, and will probably never be reused. The rest of the infrastructure will be replaced on the same timescale as well.
There is a reason why rural customers have such a hard time getting decent internet service, and why satellite internet is more economical for them. It’s not immediately obvious to me that the infrastructure cost of Starlink service is larger than the cost of your cable service. You cannot condemn satellite internet services simply because they use a lot of satellites without also condemning terrestrial internet services.
And if it is at all worthwhile for you to have fast internet access in the city, then it is equally worthwhile for folk living in rural areas to have fast internet access too.
Just to keep some perspective on the numbers, all Starlink satellites launched so far, I mean all of them together, don't make the MTOW of three Boeing 747s or ten 737s.
If you count the fuel used to keep planes flying I wouldn't be surprised if the satellites launches actually polluted a lot less. Don't forget that every launch, although surely consuming a lot more fuel than an airplane, brings in orbit 60 satellites, and there have been about 30 of them so far. I you compare these figures to the thousands planes flying every day, it should give a very different perspective.
Please note that I'm against pollution as you, also I am not a Tesla or Musk fan; they make great products, but that doesn't prevent me to think he's an absolute ass.
Are you really comparing bridges to be replaced every 50 years, and regular satellites expected to operate for 2 decades, with these Spacex sattelites which are expected to last 5 years?
Residential broadband involves millions of items such as switches, transceivers and billions of miles of cables. Much of this is replaced every 5 years by ISPs. Not even taking wireless routers into account which are probably replaced much sooner than that.
I'd imagine Starlink at least has less impact than our current infrastructure.
So you're saying we shouldn't put networking equipment of the sort in LEO? I don't understand your position. Switches in datacenters and deployed to provide internet to consumers are thrown away very frequently, and LEO satellites don't pollute their orbits with debris since unpowered flight at these altitudes regresses due to atmospheric drag (that's a desirable outcome). The timing works out.
I prefer this to an alternative where a failed constellation would be left as garbage to orbit the planet for decades/centuries. And I'd bet a few thousand satellites in space (including fuel used to put it up there) has an overall lower impact in the environment than the sprawling equipment and cabling needed to do the same coverage if using ground technologies (including all the resources used to install and maintain said equipment, and ecological damage).