"This [CBDCs] could enable central banks to encourage or discourage certain spending in more targeted ways, for example by restricting what can be spent by people in certain areas or income brackets."
There's also an argument that higher rates are better for the environment. They are a headwind to rampant consumption. They decrease investment in areas that might not generate a return, focusing resources on existing viable businesses instead of new unproven businesses that are likely to fail (wasted energy).
The forest example is very reductive and completely ignores other costs and factors: the expected price of timber and machinery in the future, and the inflation rate in general, the cost of re-planting the forest, wages, the convexity risk of the bonds (if rates appear to be accelerating higher, your bonds will drop in value), the confidence in the government, ... and so on. It also doesn't consider that higher rates curb construction loans, and thus decrease excessive demand for timber, which results in a pile up of timber inventories initially. Businesses then react by doing less logging in future.
Zero rates (or more accurately artificially low rates) encourage gambling and waste. If I can get a cheap loan, I can go buy loads of machinery and land and start logging, whereas I wouldn't have bothered if the financing wasn't available. Financial repression in China for instance allows for the cheap financing that builds enormous ghost cities. All that sand-dredging they do emits huge amounts of CO2.
