I'm very confused. There's so much chatter over the pad being destroyed and I feel like I'm out of the loop. Why is it such a big deal? Silicosis is obviously bad but how much silicosis did this issue cause?
SpaceX (or rather Musk in particular) decided against 60 years of worldwide experience and decided to forego such measures. The result was not just damage to the launch facility, but also debris being spread around at dangerous speeds in a significant radius around the pad. The latter should not have happened, especially considering that the launch site is partially surrounded by protected wildlife habitats.
The fuss is primarily about the negligence and borderline incompetence. The icing on the cake was that they already had plans to avoid this, but deliberately decided not to implement those before any launch attempt. The excuse that "they didn't expect this" sounds a bit strange, given that Saturn V and the Soviet N1 had quite substantial protection systems for their launch pads while being only half as powerful as Starship/Super Heavy.
It's really a culmination of many issues with the site, and this event is just the latest in a string of irregularities at Boca Chica. It started with a false license - the site was licenced to launch F9 and FH only; not experimental super heavy rockets - and included unlicenced launch activities that resulted in a major explosion (see https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/faa-defends-spacex-despite-u...).
It's not just about a destroyed launch pad, it's more about the entirety of SpaceX's activities at Boca Chica. It doesn't matter what one's personal opinion about the company as whole or its CEO is; there are some legitimate irregularities and in the end some parties decided sue.
This is a bunch of Greenpeace-types that would pat themselves on the back for stopping the construction of a nuclear power plant, while blithely ignoring the new coal power plant that had to be constructed in its place.
This is a bunch of attention seekers latching on to a famous company like leeches.