>a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land than an equivalent gas or coal plant
The land use talking point is so old that I remember hearing it in high school nearly 20 years ago. And the answer now is the same as the answer then, which is that this is not an apples to apples comparison. Windmills actually don't physically occupy something like 99% of the space over which they are distributed, and they are located so as not to interfere with other forms of land use, on land that wouldn't otherwise be used for something.
With solar panels it's a little bit more nuanced because apparently there have been some cases where land has been cleared to make space for panels, which is bad. I would like to think however that's unrepresentative, and the same thing is true of solar panels that they're located in ways that don't interfere with other forms of land use.
Even if wind and solar were not renewable these would still be distinctive advantages they have on the land use question. But if you throw all those nuances away and purely look at something like energy generation per square meter, it makes it look like there's some sort of losing proposition you have to worry about with solar and wind, even though there really isn't.
I do think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument, because like so many other things in this thread, it's this dangling concern with an open unquantified implication for how significant it's supposed to be. That open-ended implication allows a skeptic to get away with implying that maybe it's a big problem without doing any of the work. In my opinion we are now far enough along into the renewable energy transition that this kind of rhetorical move should not be allowed, it should be considered poor form. You want to say it's a problem, that's fair and good, but how big of a problem? Are you at least interested in that kind of question or understand why it's important? What's the upshot? Is the idea that we abandon renewable energy altogether, do 5% less or something? Is it that we do exactly as much as before but we all just agree to be really careful? And why should I have to do your work for you of working through with the implication is supposed to be?
I think a lot of the problems with aesthetics are similar in that there are strategic ways to mitigate them, but perhaps more importantly I don't think that there are actually aesthetic problems here in the first place, and we seem to get along just fine without applying those standards to status quo infrastructure. But, here again, even if we agree that it's a problem, and did some sort of like economic analysis of the trade-off there, we would have to weigh that against the benefits of renewables writ large, are we looking at one penny of problem versus $1 of benefit? I suspect that that even would overstate the problem, but again, It's this unquantified open-ended implication that seems to be doing no work whatsoever to assess the relative scale of the problem and weigh it against the benefits brought by renewables.