I'd suggest that the apparent shallowness of technology skeptics comes from two principle factors:

- The most readily-dismissed skeptics are those whose critiques are readily grasped ... and wrong. Effectively this is a strawman dismissal, as the strong criticisms are not addressed substantively. (Your own criticism fails to detail what specific elements of Malthusian though, either original or current, you disagree with.)

- Those who are prone to dismiss skeptics are themselves frequently falling victim to the biases I've mentioned.

The principle omission from Malthus's calculus was that humans would spend the next 200+ years consuming the great prize of stored fossil fuels in the Earth, a nonrenewable resource which would eventually overwhelm its environmental sinks as well, at rates of up to 5 million times those of formation.[1] Increases in net human productivity track very closely to per-capita energy usage.[2]

Note that in Adam Smith's own arguments over how nations grew their wealth, he also missed the role the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel powered machinery would play. That's a significant omission, because Smith was a Scott, living and working in Glasgow at the same time as James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and more than that, arranged for Watt's appointment to the University of Glasgow and had intimate discussions with Watt about his work. The net result of this is one brief mention within Wealth of Nations, concerning the event by which an improvement was made to the engine (a boy wanting to play with his friends). Even Smith's contemporaneous biographer, Dugald Stewart, fails to mention Watt at all.[4]

The significance of the Industrial Revolution was not evident even to those smack in the middle of it. Nor was it especially beneficial to the bulk of the population until the rise of the labour movement in Britain. The Irish Potato Famine (1845--1852, 1 million deaths, a 20--25% fall in Ireland's population from which it has not yet recovered)[5], for what it's worth, happened directly in the middle of the first Industrial Revolution.

The core of the "limits to growth" view is just that: that growth has limits. That unconstrained, those limits will out. Just where those limits lie, or what mechanisms might further delay their realisation for another few decades, isn't always clear. But pointing out the moral reprehensibility of one means of imposing them doesn't mean others won't eventually manifest. War, disease, and famine are the usual suspects. It's interesting to note that ideological rejection of Limits to Growth was led by both the left and the right.[6] Singing "la-la-la" and closing ones eyes is merely wishful thinking and the fallacy of argument from consequence.[7]

The underlying motivation I find most compelling in the Limits discussion is of coming up with better understanding of what growth is, what causes it, what the specific mechanisms of technology are, and were limits might be found. My realisation in studying the question for well over a decade is that these questions aren't well-answered by the proponents of unlimited growth, that their reasoning often appears motivated (whether consciously or not), and that there's a widespread agreement among economists that growth --- the topic of Smith's foundational book --- is NOT well-understood.[8]

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Notes:

1. See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C... (PDF)

2. Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization (2018) and Energy in World History (1994) both illustrate this in depth. https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his... https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/... Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth" (2017) does not* take this view, but nonetheless notes that industrial output per worker rose in lockstep with direct energy supplied per worker, measured in either kilowatts or horsepower. https://www.worldcat.org/title/rise-and-fall-of-american-gro... Steve Keen argues that the Cobb-Douglas production function, in which output is a function of capital and labour, is vastly more powerful as an explanation (with a far smaller residual) when an energy term is added. See "A Note on the Role of Energy in Production" (2019) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218... "Incorporating Energy Into Production Functions" https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/2016/08/19/incorporat...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt

4. Life of Adam Smith https://delong.typepad.com/files/stewart.pdf

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

6. See Mauricio Schoijet, "Limits to Growth and the Rise of Catastrophism" (1999) for a catalogue of responses. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399

7. https://yandoo.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/argument-from-conseq...

8. See for example Paul Krugman and Tony Atkinson in conversation, beginning at 38m53s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l6E3mUNW70&t=38m53s and discussed here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf57z/econ_pa...