To the modern eye, it seems obvious that microwave cooking can only be about reheating ready-made frozen food.
This seems false – I think it’s normal for modern people to use microwaves for things like oatmeal, refrigerated leftovers, potato flakes, melting chocolate and butter, and heating water for tea. I personally grew up using the microwave for quesadillas and apple slices as well.
Addendum: Without any special tools, the microwave is also great for roasting nuts.
I notice that you bring up some issues where one ‘side’ of an issue is easy to poke with a stick and the other ‘side’ is quite hard. You talk about veganism having easy to poke aspects (digestive effects of food, substitution quality of vegan butter, et cetera) and hard to poke aspects (assessment of moral patienthood), but a focus purely on the pokeable aspects leads to a focus purely on the *downsides*. This seems likely to encourage some bias.