Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:

- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution

- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads

LLM calls are getting cheaper every day.