Chiming in with my own thoughts.

I regularly see people calling for massive reductions in population and I don’t think they are as informed about the subject as they think they are. For starters I usually get the feeling that they think degrowth will be painless or relatively painless even when massive. It won’t, even a slight reduction in worker population each generation is massively going to decrease the standard of living, starting with pretty much every luxury service we have. Any innovation in tech? Yeah not gonna happen anymore, there is not enough breathing room in the economy to waste on fancy little toys. In a system set on degrowth any available resource will be exclusively used to maintain the status quo, forget improvements.

Thinking further beyond the immediate consequences there is the long term question of what we want to happen to humanity. If people think we should go extinct then degrowth is a perfectly viable strategy for making that take a bit longer, if we are to potentially survive indefinitely degrowth is not an option. We are consuming more depletable resources than any individual can count and a great many of them have already dropped below a level where we could rediscover them. For example: There is not enough surface ore (coal, iron, copper, etc) in the world anymore to repeat an industrial revolution. If we lose the capacity of mass production that’s it, no second attempt. And it is like that with many resources, Helium is running out in iirc ~100 years, Uranium for reactors in iirc ~80 years, nitrate needed for fertilizers is running low and concrete manufacturers are looking into alternatives to river sand because that is also running dangerously low. Now we can stop growth and extend the usable time we have left with these resources but they will run out eventually. Or alternatively we can stop pretending that stagnation has ever worked for anything (no not even nature works with stagnation, a forest with only old trees dies together with its entire animal population and is eventually replaced by a new forest with young trees) and start working on solution to that problem. If we don’t want to got extinct the only solution is to get off this rock and start mining the planets we don’t have to be careful with. We cannot strip mine earth because it’s the only habitable place we have but we don’t have that problem with any other celestial body.

As for the short term, getting rid of the excessively wealthy would be a good start, it’s not like we lack resources as is, it’s just that 0.1% of the population are hogging 99% of it for themselves. Imo eating the rich will net much better results than doing a china and having less kids (btw anyone check on how their industry is doing, cuz last I checked their government is panicking a bit about the side effects the decline in workforce brings with it)