You know, I agree with you, I think there's not necessarily a problem with CRISPR or GMOs or mutagenic selective breeding, or whatever.
But there are real issues: novel introductions make it harder to define how we talk about food safety in general, since almost all of it is based on both a very poor science (nutrition science is a dumpster fire) and long-term use by humans (GRAS) where previous generations were test subjects. The industry around this basically ignores these issues and pretends they don't exist and they label anyone raising issues as "anti-science."
Put another way: industries _usually_ don't end up untrusted because people are crazy, they _usually_ earned it, and GMO big ag has earned it in spades.
It's not just the original go to market being terminator seeds and submarining in patents, or to enable soaking fields with RoundUp, it's also that when people talk about GMOs, they're often talking about transgenic GMOs, things like Flavr Savr and the generally borderline-gaslighting issue around the industry and FDA pretending that labeling food with actual information would be bad (which has come up over and over, not just with GMOs).
There's also the disingenuous approach to pretending that modern genetic engineering is "just" accelerated breeding, which frankly isn't true and mostly relies on the fact that modern breeding uses mutagens to accelerate a process which makes coming up with a useful definition of GRAS quite difficult.
Basically the industry's argument was "GMO is no worse/different than what we've been doing for thirty years that you didn't know about, so it's fine" which, shocking, has kind of fallen flat because it is an outright lie.
Gaslighting is an overused term, but the industry's"it's just selective breeding!" argument is really pretty phony, and that's ignoring transgenic GMOs.
Before I get labeled "anti-science", I'm actually pro GMO, pro-GMO food and so on. But only in a functional regulatory environment, which we do not have at the moment.