This is pretty naive take. We have turned eras of lush forests into essentially deserts and killed water sheds. These things don’t default back to a thriving ecosystem. Lots of the time they are just dead. Pre tree planting, after clear cutting, there’s a lot of “forests” in bc that are just one canopy hemlock swaths. They need to be thinned and diversified because the are essentially “dead” forests. A lot of work needs to be put into these areas, as the water sheds are falling apart and dying as a result.
That’s because it’s a bad point. An ecosystem can collapse for multiple reasons, e.g. collapse due pollution will not create a thriving ecosystem.
In almost all cases, when a collapsed ecosystem reaches homeostasis again, the result is a more fragile and less diverse balance than what was there previously.
It's a question of timescales and degrees and magnitudes, not of binary "did or didn't destroy". If we hadn't stopped redwood logging in the 20th century, yeah, the ecosystem would be replaced... But probably by something smaller and faster growing. Victory! Redwoods got replaced by smaller trees, mission success.
Monocultures are a scary thing (I'm sure you've heard about how we had to completely switch banana varietals), and having resilient ecosystems is important. I think ATM the consensus is having an apex predator does actually help the stability of these sorts of ecosystems and leads to outcomes most would consider favorable (greater diversity, better density, closer to an equilibrium). Now, we could surely fix this problem by doing it ourselves (eg by subsidizing deer and rabbit hunting and venison), but wolves are probably cheaper.
> are rapidly moving towards the sixth ones by all accounts
The scientific consensus isn't that we're "moving towards" a mass extinction. It's that we're deep into one, and accelerating.
"Current extinction rates are estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates [13][14][15][16][17] and are accelerating."
When you "destroy" an ecosystem, a new one will take its place. The remaining animals and plants will converge on a new balanced state.
The ecosystems we admire today are often that new balance after humans destroyed the natural one.