>However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever.

All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis.

The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).