Saying, "Experiencing some friction is good for building character" is not equivalent to saying "We should demolish all technology and force babies to survive on their own in the woods."
That the extreme position is wrong does not strictly imply that the moderate position is too.
This is the particular problem with deciding a position, it's all shades of grey.
200 years ago a good number of humans thought that owning other humans was a-ok. Today that's mostly not true. In 200 years it's likely the vast majority of humanity will look at eating meat and owning pets at the same level of horror. Which is the extreme position? Which is the moderate?
Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.
Think of combined manpower. If you have 2 people working an 8 hour shift you've spent 16 hours.
/Pedantry crisis averted.
Fun math!
[0]Crockford et al. (2023) estimate about 10^30 cells exist today, and between 10^39 and 10^40 cells have ever existed on Earth.