It's a goofy premise to begin with cause there are plenty of inventions that can be lived without. You can, for example, go live on a farm with minimal use of tech and it will mainly only become a problem when you need modern medicine. Now if you have options in that way and so are cosplaying at being pre-tech, that's more like tourism than it is actually living in the era before stuff was made or living in a region where access to the stuff is minimal.

Furthermore, gen AI (cause that's usually what people mean when they are anti) is not yet integrated into society as essential, so naturally it will be relatively easy for people to say "yeah I can live without it." If you asked the same about cars when cars are still a rare thing, you'd probably get a lot who say the same. And considering the environmental consequences of tons of people having individual gas guzzling cars, you could probably argue from an ecosystem-protecting standpoint that they never should have proliferated. But they did and by this point, they are, for many, integrated as essential for getting around (they shouldn't have to be when high speed trains are an option to build, but capitalism keeps holding society back).

So sometimes it's less about the technology itself and more about how society has developed around the technology - or in this case, has not really done yet beyond superficial application, making the concept of giving it up seem trivial. This doesn't on its own say to what extent the given tech is helpful or harmful, it just means it hasn't been integrated much. People are more willing to defend something they take for granted as normal, especially if they grew up with it.