it wouldn’t be pushed on us

The Internet was pushed on everyone.

Sure companies were excited to promote it, but it was primarily adopted because of a very large amount of people being excited about it.

how can it be trusted without human verification

You use Google despite no human verification. Yahoo used to function based on human curated lists.

I use DuckDuckGo to find sources, not answers. I won’t use them again if they’re trash. They’re accountable for their content.

Human curated lists are still very helpful. In a sense, that was the value of Reddit.

environmental impact

I did the math and posted it on Lemmy.

I’ll take your word for it.