This is indeed a policy aimed at reducing e-waste, including resources and harmful substances from batteries.

So allow to find that "yay I can buy more batteries!" is a highly ironic response.

And again, all the statements that it this "obviously" better than possibly buying a new phone seem to lack any references to actual data...

The mistake in your argument is thinking that buying batteries results directly in e-waste. It first results in more working batteries being used over the lifetime of a device. Whether that results in more or less waste batteries in wallclock time depends on how that affects the time the device is used. If batteries are also standardized and thus device independent, the device becoming waste also doesn't mean the battery becoming waste automatically.

But yeah, I can see the irony in my comment.

I can't believe you're arguing in good faith. Obviously just replacing the battery is better than replacing the whole device and all it's components just because the battery is bad.

The User above also said he bought two or three batteries, so he can swap them out when the battery is empty (I've also done this with my laptop) and distributing the charging cycles between the batteries, so they will all last longer.

If he wasn't a power user, he wouldn't drop money on two or three batteries in the beginning, and just buy a new one when the old goes bad.