It's the frustrating nature of politics. When an issue first starts to reach the general public consciousness, you tend to see arguments for/against from people who have been thinking about it for a while. As it reaches a wider argument, those arguments get distilled and removed from their context, and they end up being used as liturgy by people who decide on their position first and come up with the reasons second. "Some data centers have wasteful open-loop water cooling systems" -> "data centers waste all our water" etc.

Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.