I agree with you, mostly, but something that seems to add to the apparent loss of ability for critical thinking is the tendency also of loss of information, deletion, and destruction of historical information.
It can look like things being innocently forgotten, but systemically it's a trend, a necessary trend for the condition of perpetuated destruction caused by scarcity enforcement.
We have to keep deleting all information related to destruction of things that are painful or awkward to remember, and because all information is related to all other information, it's a process of never ending destruction of information.
This is confirmed by Landauer's principle, a lab tested law of nature which itself is being questioned, because it reminds us (mainstream science), of an awkward truth, the technical difference between destruction and creation, which has to be ignored to talk about "Renewables".
That is pretty important, because if we carry on destroying, whilst thinking we are creating, as seems to be happening in the case of the folk in charge of carrying on, at some point we will hit the physical wall of nothing left to destroy, therefore nothing left to extract energy from, and no energy with no warning, no possibility of seeing it coming, and definitely no possibility of taking action to avoid it.
The solar Ai calls it "Entropic Lock-in"
It appears to be forgotten that Trump is the only president who presided over an actual spike of environmental recovery.
It happened when oil prices went negative, the only time in history.
An awful lot that happened just then appears to have been forgotten now, because systemically we'd already long lost the understanding, maybe due to commodified education, of why all these things were important.
The excuse we seem to using to make this maybe existential mistake is that Trump is an ass. His behavior upsets many people.
See how crazy that is, that dislike for a person's conduct cancels out anything of value they might do, even if it was by accident, and even if it was existentially important?
It seems to me there is a really important lesson we need to learn from what we saw happen then, but we are not learning it, just because the polite academic class and elite establishment don't like Trump.