I think people get into the mindset of needing to go nuts when exercising/health or they need to be at a gym. All they need to do is be active for about 30 minutes each day by going for a walk or biking.
Many cultures and countries ranked as healthy, and I mean overall like children to elderly are places where people walk everywhere. They aren't all power lifting or even going to gyms.
Strength training is good but overall daily activity is best.
True, but statistics has nothing to do with correctness. Something done in excess, in either direction, is done in excess regardless of how many people do it.
The via media comes with difficulty as it requires reason and discernment, whereas extremes are easy and mindless, and people either under-exercise (the more common case) or over-exercise.
But historically, I would argue that we see more extreme "fitness" fads today than we did previously. Really dumb stuff that no longer has anything to do with health or fitness or beauty and more to do with some weird obsession.
To put it in programming terms, you're likely to improve more with the slow grind of an hour or so an evening side-project, rather than competing in a hackathon every 3 months.
One observation I had was that people coming to the gym to spend majority of their time on the treadmill are mostly women. I'm not sure if it is to lose weight, or simply because with infrastructure hostile to walking, the likelihood of problematic encounters increases greatly. Though I wouldn't feel entirely safe walking around at 23:00 without my dog either.
Many cultures and countries ranked as healthy, and I mean overall like children to elderly are places where people walk everywhere. They aren't all power lifting or even going to gyms.
Strength training is good but overall daily activity is best.