To your last paragraph, you can actually rent a substantial work truck from Home Depot.
I think a lot of the argument comes down to the idea of using the right tool for the job. Look around at the people sitting in traffic with you. Some are filling their truck beds with stuff, sure, but plenty of others are not, and are driving with one occupant. Suddently you don't need all those seats or that towing capacity to pick up a bag of coffee, like you don't need an octocore processor to run your hello world script. Maybe you can get away with an ebike and a cargo rack, and orders of magnitude less energy spent to do the same work of you getting that bag of coffee.
You'd put even less wear on your other vehicles, like that work truck you really need once or twice a month by not using them every day for all other tasks you do in life. Maybe that work truck you own can now last 10x as long in your hands with the lightened use it now sees. That means you can now own a work truck while consuming 1/10th the resources it takes to keep up a steady supply of work trucks for yourself from the environment. That's huge.
I think a lot of the argument comes down to the idea of using the right tool for the job. Look around at the people sitting in traffic with you. Some are filling their truck beds with stuff, sure, but plenty of others are not, and are driving with one occupant. Suddently you don't need all those seats or that towing capacity to pick up a bag of coffee, like you don't need an octocore processor to run your hello world script. Maybe you can get away with an ebike and a cargo rack, and orders of magnitude less energy spent to do the same work of you getting that bag of coffee.
You'd put even less wear on your other vehicles, like that work truck you really need once or twice a month by not using them every day for all other tasks you do in life. Maybe that work truck you own can now last 10x as long in your hands with the lightened use it now sees. That means you can now own a work truck while consuming 1/10th the resources it takes to keep up a steady supply of work trucks for yourself from the environment. That's huge.