I agree with you on this story. This is something many folk formerly in satellite communications, before it went strange with Starlink, have been warning about. Starlink was a "competitive" reaction by the US / Musk to the 20 year 5G worldwide effort lead until that point by Huawei, working with UK CESG and others from other countries.
The US trashed its relations with Huawei when it literally jailed their CEO, having her arrested in Canada. She got let out eventually, in exchange for two canadians accused of things in China, but who could expect Huawei to ever forgive the US for that.
The US followed up by trying to get Huawei phones barred from all Western countries. That was when I was working on the skeletal tracking capability uniquely offered by Huawei phones, which were a quarter of the price of an iphone, and had stuff on them that we still aspired to research, projecting maybe two or three years to achieve - they are so far ahead now in everything, due to the money that has been invested in their technology - much more cleverly invested than the money we have morons throwing around now, launching sportscars, shrapnel, and other fireworks into space.
Full blown traditional satellites up until then were projected to have at least 10 year lifetimes, with enough fuel onboard to last that long in permanently maintained orbits. For that they had to have at least N+4 redundancy in the electronics, as well as all silicon chips being "Radiation hardened". Development and testing of radiation hardened components like this takes many years, and is expensive.
Musk's shrapnel horde avoided all of that, being developed in about a year flat.
So it's impossible that it can have anything like the permanence of the other stuff up there.
The scary thing is the power of investors. They get behind one cult leader, in this case Musk, and nothing can stop what their money does.
In this case the cult of Musk is likely to do more damage than any other cult seen in history.
They live in a bubble of artifically created reality, unable to grasp what the difference is between folk with real experience and expertise, and others who just make the right noises, whilst "Running fast, breaking things".
Well now there are so many things up there running fast, out of control, more going out of control every day, which sooner or later have to break something, actaully everything.
Well done Elon, and all the Elon starstruck investors.
