Like, where does this come from? Even people that aren’t particularly conservative seem to think that less people = good. Maybe the problem isn’t the amount of people but how their needs are met? Yes, the world is finite, but pretending that hunger, homelessness, wars and diseases are in anyway caused by the amount of people on Earth rather than how we deal with those things is as insane as denying climate change.
I think part of it is that for a westerner to confront the fact that overpopulation isn’t an inherent issue, we have abundant resources to handle a huge population, then they’re forced to confront that it’s an issue of resource allocation. And when that happens westerners are programmed to start screaming about commies the same way that they imagine dirty peasants used to scream about witches. So for the last god knows how many years anytime western media has a narrative that needs to confront the issue of resource allocation they skirt the problem by saying there are too many people and that’s the real issue. That and the implied racism of saying the problem is overpopulation is killing two birds with one stone, so it’s a narrative that stuck around in western media and became a convenient misdirection.