Just paint the satellites black?

Yes https://physicsworld.com/a/dark-coated-starlink-satellites-a...

Even better, paint it vantablack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

Can't tell if you're joking or not, but SpaceX has indeed been collaborating with astronomical observatories to reduce the apparent magnitude (brightness) to ground for Starlink satellites. It's not as if the potential issues weren't apparent and reported on pretty early on, ie, [0] in summer 2020 before the network entered beta. It's not perfect and the period during orbit raising before the satellites enter operational orbits is more challenging, but very significant reductions have been achieved per recs, see for example "Starlink Gen 2 Mini Satellites Photometric Characterization" [1] in 2023 and "The Brightness of Starlink Mini Satellites During Orbit-Raising" [2] in 2024:

>When magnitudes are adjusted to a uniform distance of 1000 km the means are 4.58 and 7.52, respectively. The difference of 2.94 between distance-adjusted magnitudes above and below threshold implies that mitigation is 93% effective in reducing the brightness of orbit-raising spacecraft.

So there has been progress, though more may be possible particularly as Starship gives them more mass to work with for less money. That may bring new possibilities to spend mass on "cosmetic" purposes to shade and further reduce magnitude even if it contributes nothing to the core functionality. Same as more mass may allow regulators to feasibly require higher levels of redundancy and more margin for deorbiting in case of issues or at EOL.

Of course, that does leave older unmitigated working sats contributing to light pollution for the rest of their operational lifetimes, though worth noting that one of many major advantages for low-LEO/VLEO operation is that by design such lifetimes are much shorter, and in turn generation refresh will happen more quickly. Perhaps more importantly long term, there aren't as far as I know any actual international standards and agreements towards responsible brightness mitigation (or other issues like disposing of expended upper stages responsibly, standardized end-of-life deorbiting, etc). SpaceX has, for both PR and simple corporate self-interest reasons, been a pretty good actor so far even if they get a lot of attention for being the leading first mega constellation. But I really hope follow on efforts from other players can hit the ground running with magnitude reductions at least as good, and that SpaceX itself continues to improve (or at a bare minimum not backslide).

High bandwidth fully global comms is simply too valuable a capability to really imagine going back at this point. But that's no reason not to pursue reasonable compromise mitigations, and potentially some sort of funds to ultimately create far more orbital telescopes as well as part of the package taking full advantage of what upcoming cheap megalift will make possible.

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0: "Impact of Satellite Constellations on Optical Astronomy and Recommendations Toward Mitigations" | https://aas.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/SATCON1-Report.p...

1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.06657

2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.12007

It should also be possible to de-orbit obsolete satellites faster if they can at end-of-life deploy a "sail" that will cause more drag.

Might then have a lot of overheating satellites :)