Exactly. Even from a purely technological perspective, it’s not needed. What we’d need is data efficiency when we use the existing infrastructure. In the last 20 years, nobody cared about data efficiency in networks. It’s always about more data throughput, without asking if the data we send still means anything much? My guesstimate is that >95% of the data transferred does not mean anything. The exact same content and behavior could be transported with the remaining 5%. For example, we could remove all the bloated JavaScript of advertising trackers. Or (but that’s a recent innovation) we could transition from JPG images to BPG (astonishing side-by-side comparison here and here) or to the (even better and completely free of patent nonsense) AVIF format.
What 5G will enable is even more data bloat, and because bloated rather than size-optimized data is “convenient” on the developer side, that’s what we’ll get.