Whether total value goes up or down (or stays the same), is an important question.
And, obviously, the winners and losers are not going to be identical. Especially for anything that involves fatalities or injuries.
(If you want them to be as close to identical as possible, there's an interesting discussion to be had about mechanisms to achieve that goal!)
I understand the article to be reporting on some interesting economic papers with counterintuitive results. Of course, those always come with huge caveats, that the article also mentioned.
I don't see any outright arguing for destruction.
See especially the section 'Wait a minute, this is completely insane!'
> If you accept that (and you should), the only question left is whether the benefits actually exceed the costs. Now we're just haggling over the price, as Churchill said.
The author tries to appear neutral, but their preference is obvious for me.
Your point is that not everyone is better off, so destruction is not a pareto improvement. Their point is that on net, value is increased, so in theory the ones who are worse off could be made whole through a wealth transfer, and there'd still be a surplus, a Kaldor-Hicks improvement.
I'm not saying this is necessarily true, but it seems like a major problem with K-H as a concept that I personally don't see discussed (I imagine it is discussed in academic journals somewhere).
They would encourage gentrification, but also tax it (in a sense).