> what ISN'T a "colossal waste of time and money kept alive primarily by stupid romanticism"?
Something that will achieve its stated goals? Something whose stated goals are something other than that thing itself (and the thing itself will be only very peripherally experienced by almost everybody involved)? Something where, when you ask people what they're trying to achieve, you get something other than a series of straight up false claims that they've obviously avoided looking into deeply, plus a bunch of incoherent drivel about the "spirit of exploration"?
Something like a space telescope produces something more than just experience
in building space telescopes. Comsats have a use beyond building comsats. So would manufacturing, if the applications weren't trumped up silliness that vastly exaggerates the value of the space environment... but you don't need people for that and you don't build the factory before you have an ACTUAL profitable product in mind.
Crewed space flight, as presently done, only teaches you how to do crewed space flight... and do it in a way that's not going to scale. And it's not even yielding a lot of really new insight into that any more. It is NOT going to advance the goal of having large space colonies[^1]. It's NOT going to advance the goal of being able to do any significant amount of science or industry in space.
It's just tourism, and for 99.99999 percent of the people supporting it, it'll be vicarious tourism. Tourism doesn't have zero value, but it has low enough value that it's reasonable to expect the people actually going to pay for the entire program personally... which they cannot do.
If you actually wanted to colonize the whole galaxy or whatever, you'd dump your resources into bioengineering something human-like that was better suited to space, and/or into robotics. You would not bother to actually send the results into space until you had something worth testing. Which would be at least decades away even if you diverted all the resources being dumped into ratholes like space stations. And would have just a few wee social and ethical problems.
[^1]: Nor would having large space colonies advance the goal of preventing human extinction. Among other huge problems, even if you could colonize the whole galaxy, the things that would arrive wouldn't be recognizably human or probably even much like humans.