I think they meant "not unlike" as - we didn't think asbestos was bad, then we thought it could be bad, then yes, after studies, this is really awful. Similarly, we might find that ingested plastics cause more damage than we realize now.

There was never any doubt about asbestos, we just didn't care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Kershaw

Two things.

The first is that that is actually crazy late to me. Asbestos has been in use since antiquity. I am genuinely surprised that something so toxic wasn’t noticed earlier. Then again, in times where tuberculosis was common I suppose it wouldn’t have looked that odd.

The second is that you’re viewing it through a modern lens, where of course literally everyone should believe and know that it’s bad the very first time someone notices it. The reality is that it would be much more murky. I would not be at all surprised if microplastics are viewed the same way in 100 years; how could they not have immediately known it was bad? Because we need to quantify how bad, and we can’t just force feed it to people so we have to wait until we naturally get case studies.

We really don’t need to quantify that.

We knew smoking was bad, we knew plastics were bad, we knew PFAS was bad.

But it’s cheaper than the alternatives, so we pretend we need studies to show “how bad exactly”. We don’t. We really, really don’t.