Providing a good escape from reality can lower people’s demands of reality, which can lead to a more sustainable future. If people can eat beans but be tricked into thinking they’re eating steak it can improve health and lower emissions, for example.
I think you should look at the roots of theatre. The principal function of theatre wasn't escapism but Catharsis, the cleansing of one's emotional state to be able to re-engage with the world and to renew and restore oneself.
Good fiction engages a person with the world and prepares them to improve their society and culture. It doesn't produce a bunch of obese Wall-E people who live on canned beans binging Netflix all day.
Your own brain does almost all the work of manufacturing the reality, the author only provides the barest of guides. And your mind also adds layers of meaning onto whatever meaning the author makes explicit.
So I would say the act of reading a book is far from a passive or trivial activity.
In fact, I am hard pressed to imagine another activity so dependent on our own brain's ability for continuous creative production. D&D, scientific research, etc. all happen at a much slower pace.
I would never make a blanket statement like VR or the metaverse is bad (especially cause it doesn't seem to exist in a fully realized form yet) but the vision doesn't particularly inspire me, and Hanke is trying to appeal to that POV by mentioning dystopian scifi representations of it, where it represented an escape from a disturbing reality.
