There certainly is a real concern for astronomers, but the photo illustrations used in the article are selected to make things seem worse than they really are. They're wide field of view, long-duration exposures. That
used to be the way astronomers imaged space, with film systems a century ago. But these days astronomical telescopes tend to have much narrower fields of view (like tiny soda straws peering into one particular spot in space) and use image stacking, a technique where many individual images are processed to form the final image (very simplistic overview:
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/astropho... .) Using image stacking and armed with accurate catalogs that predict precisely where every satellite will be at any time, enables the removal of satellites during the image stacking process. Or they can just use that information for better scheduling: wait a minute or two to image a particular spot, so there won't be satellites in the field of view.
The article definitely gets this part right:
> “Some astronomers see this as a true ‘hair on fire’ emergency, heralding irretrievable losses to space science; others present a more sanguine face, depicting this as yet another challenge to be surmounted in surveying a decreasingly pristine sky,” Koplow remarks.
Being involved in both space and astronomy plants me squarely in the latter camp. It takes a bit more work and software, but having so many satellites in space is a surmountable challenge for terrestrial astronomers. (Not to mention, these days some of the best astronomy is performed by telescopes in space, so astronomy overall benefits by having easier access to space.)