Am I misunderstanding you? Sure, we probably won’t be able to continue expanding exponentially, but to be honest I don’t really care if we grow forever or stay steady at 10 billion.

There’s a significant, nonzero risk of complete species death though, a matter about which I care a great deal. Extinction is worse than stagnation.

Counterpoint: the countries most responsible for messing with planetary balance are not the ones experiencing significant population growth.

There's good evidence that if we can alleviate poverty and child mortality everywhere, fertility rates will start coming down like they have in richer countries and we'll end up at 10-11 billion people.