There are some important nuance here that I believe you are missing in your criticism.

Malthus was suggesting that population growth would simply lead to more poverty. Malthus was wrong in that we managed to grow the population while also growing income per person.

However you make a flawed inference from this observation. The fact that we were able to beat poverty while growing the population does not mean that population growth causes income to grow per person.

If this was true, then India and China should have had the richest people on the planet and Icelanders should all be dirt poor.

The fact that we have been able to overcome the problems of population growth does not mean population growth is a good thing, or that lower population growth would not have led to better outcomes.

Almost all societies which have gone through a rapid economic growth have done so when population growth has begun to stall. At that point their reap a demographic benefit. Society had few children and few old people relative to people at working age. That often helps kickstart a sustained growth for many countries.

There is a second flaw in your inference: Malthus was talking about poverty not the environment. Even if we have overcome poverty problems we have still inflicted massive ecological damage.

Much of what was early civilization has become deforrested and desert thanks to humans chopping down too much of the forrrest and overtaxing the Earth with too extensive irrigation. Ancient Sumer doomed itself by turing the soil too salty for anything to grow thanks to overirrigation.

A key reason why the center of civilization moved from the middle East towards the Mediterranean and later towards the North Sea was that as civilization flourished it would also gradually destroy its natural surroundings. Ancient Greece saw massive loss of forrest and fertile soil. Improtant martitiem trade would twindle because they would lack lumber to build enough ships.

There are island societies which have destroyed their livelyhood by chopping down all the trees and thus preventing themselves from making fishing boats.

We hunted the whales to near extinction thus destroying an extremely important resource for humans. Whale oil used to be used for paint, lubricant, margarin, makeup and a long list of chemicals. Mineral oil became an important subsitute when we had hunted whales to near extinction. I cover a lot of these stories here: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/it-will-get-ugly-but-we-will-survive-5aa22d265999

There are more than two perspectives on these issues. You don't have to be a naive technology optimist or a doom and gloom environmentalist.

I am in between. I know we will not perish from global warming or overpopulation. My point is that both global warming and overpopulation means making life a lot harder on ourselves.

Countries with more resources and less people have a much easier time. The evidence of that is pretty clear. Colonists in the New World had a much better time than in Europe. They made 3-4 times as much in wages in 1770s. Why was that? Because the population in North America was so low and there was a large amount of resources.

The argument you are basically pushing here is to suggest I am wrong because Europe managed to prosper despite the high population density. Yes, Europe sure did, but it prospered much slower than the US. More resources per capita allowed the US to progress faster: https://erik-engheim.medium.com/no-hard-work-and-capitalism-did-not-make-america-the-richest-9a76c1a12456