Are Hunter-Gatherers The Happiest Humans To Inhabit Earth?

They will regret it some generations later as they swing to the other extreme.

The core point here is too much of anything leads to stress. Living totally like a savage is indeed stressful. Also living a life totally immersed in urban dystopia is equally stressful. A happy medium works, but so few can get and remain there. Our economic systems encourage falling into extremes. They don't encourage stability and moderation.

This is not a settled question. The references in your link are mostly new-world non-state (nonstate != hunter-gatherer), whereas Africa, where most of human foraging history occurred is under-represented. There are significant differences in environmental constraints and physical and social ecology between these regions.

The link also mischaracterises the argument that anthropologists make: they do not believe that foragers had a fundamentally different ("noble savage in a Marxist feminist garden") character than moderns, but that their incentives and constraints differed. It is hard to find people to war with if you are living at extremely low population density, or to carry out ambush raids along long sightlines in the savannah. You are probably less likely to murder your neighbours' children if they are your nieces, or fail to share food with your brother's wife. Hunter-gatherer social technology exploiting human biases (e.g. toward kin) is often ignored in favour of wishful retrocasting of our own political viewpoints.

Globally, foragers may not have enjoyed the low levels of violence we do in modern society, but they may have been competitive with gardening/agricultural/tribal/state societies for millennia.

The Repugnant Conclusion may be of interest:

“For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

Just to be clear: everything in nature also has a ROI of sorts. I would say people who live in nature are also constrained by their environment and have to be very economical. They depend on their tribe, on the cycle of seasons and the weather, have to be prepared for chance meetings with predators, can't fully prepare for other things like trauma, infection and natural disaster etc.

The closest you can currently get to "doing as you feel", involves moving to Europe and becoming dependent on the socialist state. You can live for free in a flat forever, never have to work, get free health care for every booboo, just hang out all day surrounded by people who do the same thing. I would say this is currently the state of the art in living an unnatural life. And as a result, you might end up being miserable.

But I do sort of understand what you mean; our brains were built for living in natural environments. These impose fairly random and complex constraints, with stress coming in big but short-lived peaks and real family being constantly around.

Living in a concrete jungle and having constant low level stress, doing and eating the exact same things every day, taking pills for every little ill is a recipe for alienation and early death.

Ishmael also deals with other issues. Important issues.

Right now I don't think any truly civilized society would actually generate any garbage. When we solve that issue, we will look at the past (our present) in shame.