It doesn't seem sensationalist to me. I looked up three different strip malls that I am familiar with and all of them have some kind of PCE cleanup sites from previous or current dry-cleaners.

Here's one example in Santa Clara of a dry cleaner that operated in the 60's and there has been an active remediation project to cleanup the groundwater that has been on-going to this day [1]. In this case a single dry-cleaner which operated decades ago contaminated the water table and the chemicals flowed to neighborhoods even across the street. There is an extensive record of cleanup actions being taken on a nearly monthly basis going years back, including continuous well monitoring and soil vapor intrusion investigation. The map that was sent out to residents shows the extent of how far the ground water plume reaches, it's stunning to see how far one spill can go depending on the water table [2].

There are open remediation cases like this in almost every strip mall across America. This is a widespread problem and most people just aren't aware of the extent of it.

[1] https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/profile_report?global_...

[2] https://documents.geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/regulators/d...