Yep. I was personally misinformed the same way at some point. Never expected evaporative cooling to be so popular, but it is.

It's possible for a datacenter to use scarce well water irresponsibly.

They don't have to, and the vast majority don't.

The lie and moral panic is that all datacenters necessarily waste precious drinking water; it's patently false and used by agitators to push, unwittingly or not, a Chinese Communist Party agenda.