Smoking cigarettes has an incredibly massive public health cost. Addiction to nicotine makes people wring their hands, but population wide doesn't have a significant cost and might even be a net benefit. Vaping likewise has an incomparably minimal public health cost, though at the margins there's probably more injury than nicotine use alone.

Yes, usually there are unintended consequences. The most important unintended consequence here was the anti-vaping sentiment engendered by the anti-smoking campaign choosing to conflate nicotine with the harms from inhaling combustion byproducts and tacitly embracing a cateforical, puritanical morality regarding substance use.