Without dealing with the substance of your post I'll just note that my above post was left deliberately vague.
Historically, we're working on malthusian cycles where technology progresses due to population pressures. For the most part, this is never done with sustainability in mind, but instead usually to react to the current environment to improve immediate survival conditions for profit. During the enlightenment era the rise of science happened in reaction to how shitty everything was. But a side effect of science was that we became
so overwhelmingly good at extracting energy from our environment that a kind of energy bonanza happened.
In some sense this was pretty much pre-determined to happen, so I don't think it's a blight on the character of humanity that it did. But on the other hand it just makes me laugh that we talk about the scientific revolution as 'progressive' when it may have catastrophic consequences on our future. In that light, it may not be a negative, and I'm definitely not saying we need to
go back to a by-gone era, but I'm not sure 'progress' is the right word.
Malthus was wrong, and I think you are too
Population expansion followed technological advance, rather than drove it - as we became able to keep more people alive, humanity expanded to fill the new capability, not because of higher birthrates, but because the technologies reduced death rates.
In the 19th and particularly the 20th century, we became so good at keeping people alive that we were able to support massive population increases; But then something completely novel happened - women stopped having babies, because for the first time in human history, they had the choice to do so, the means to do so safely without denying the natural inclination of humans to fuck a lot, the expectation that having only one or two children would be sufficient to ensure the presence of adult children in her dotage, and the education to be more useful to themselves as humans than as baby-factories.
There is almost no plausible future scenario that would be more catastrophic for humanity than abandonment of technology; If we stop and try to hold in place, everything will go to shit. If we go back, everything will go to shit even faster. If we continue with current progress, then there is a small chance that everything will go to shit, but more likely, it won't.
The most plausible future for humanity is a stable population of 10 billion or so, living wealthy lives of high energy consumption, and high resource turnover*. There are a number of significant hurdles to overcome to get from here to there; but technology will play a very large role in getting us over those hurdles.
The only plausible way for us to fuck this up, is to try to stop technological progress due to a false and shortsighted idea that its minor (but obvious and worrying) problems outweigh its huge (and pervasive, but not obvious), benefits.
Imagine, if you would, talking a medieval merchant - a wealthy and educated man of his times - through a normal day in your life. He would spend the whole day with his jaw dragging the floor in astonishment at the wondrous things that you hardly even notice. Everything you do, eat, wear, live in, etc., is incredibly easy, luxurious, and spectacular, from his perspective. People adapt to the amazing so fast and so thoroughly that they no more notice the beneficial technologies that dominate every aspect of their life than a fish notices how wet everything is.
We evolved with an inherent tendency to be fearful of the novel, and distrusting of change. But the things we fear are rarely the real threats; And the things we take for granted are often far more strange and new than we realize. As long as we continue to (on average) prioritize fact over superstition, and thought and reason over appeals to nature, we will be just fine.
*Note that resources are not (and indeed, cannot be) consumed; With sufficient energy available, we can re-concentrate and recycle any resources we want, with the possible exception of Helium.