Indeed, their argument makes no sense. They would probably complain about any industry building large factories. It seems they don't like progress, and not even the status quo, they would prefer regression.
Paper provides an actual utility that people want and serves a real human need. Hyper scale data centers only exist to make Garfield porn and help scammers.
You are using HN which may or may not be hosted in datacenter.
To reach HN you are probably hopping via some communication hubs that may be located in datacenter.
You are going to store to buy some stuff which probably hosts their infra in a datacenter or use datacenter services.
You do use mobile phone? Well they also need to host services somewhere and make connectivity.
The school where your kids go either uses school management software and/or websites which provide educational material or doing exams.
Then you have online video conferencing...
I mean this list could get pretty long - I think listing them here on HN is kind of useless. It is just the datacenter infra is at the very bottom, providing foundational but invisible service to end users. Just like we don't see how things are manufactured or how raw materials are sourced for making real stuff, same goes with datacenter.
