While people living in past civilizations at their lowest points might be willing to trade places with us, the vast majority of humans for the vast majority of human history would not be. When offered to join the ranks of the civilized world, "uncivilized" indigenous people consistently turn down the offer. They think that we're all insane.

The past 20,000 years are not all of human history. Prior to the development of civilization, life was actually pretty good for most people. They also didn't have to worry about most of the things in that article. The only significant material differences were higher infant mortality, and lower overall material wealth (but this lower material wealth did not mean a lower quality of life, in general, as people's lifestyles and culture were adapted to that level of wealth). The lack of medical care was largely a non-issue, because those people did not suffer from the diseases of civilization, were typically naturally resistant to bacterial infections due to diet, and what infectious diseases did plague them were generally unable to spread very far or very fast because the different groups were not constantly forced to intermingle in tight indoor spaces at large scales.

This whole article reinforces a false narrative known as the "Myth of Progress". This is a very dangerous and toxic myth that undermines a lot of people's reasoning about what the future should look like. This is intentional - the myth of progress is propaganda pushed by the state via school curriculum and academic publication bias (though this latter mechanism is starting to fail - most academics now reject the myth of progress) to warp people's sense of what life could be like.

I would recommend that people read books like "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston A. Price, "Civilized to Death" by Christopher Ryan, or "Goliath's Curse" by Luke Kemp to get an overall better picture of the relationship between living conditions in the past versus the modern day.

To clarify, I am not suggesting that life in the stone age (or prior) is the human ideal and that we should go back to that. I am not a primtivist (though I am aware that the collapse of global civilization may limit our options, realistically). I am merely suggesting that we can't assume that life in modern civilization is as much better than life in the past as so many people claim. We should be looking at all of human history and taking the best ideas from all parts of it to inform a model of how we should be doing things going forward. In order to do that, we can't let myths cloud our perception of what the past was actually like.

I think that others have done a sufficient job of answering the main question. I have things to say about the secondary questions:

how badly damaged is it?

I am wondering how it would be possible to reverse or remove that opinion of so many.

I've actually put quite a bit of thought into this problem. Countering the intentional destruction of language in general seems to be basically impossible to do directly because of how many people there are who have no particular interest in figuring out what the word really means, and who just perpetuate the current zeitgeist via sheer inertia. It also doesn't help that there are a great many who claim to be anarchists who actually want the term to be misunderstood. The nihilistic version of anarchism that you're calling out is perfect for sociopathic individuals who want a world without accountability.

My conclusion is that the word itself has become effectively destroyed and unusable (except in contexts where you know that your audience is made of the small subset of people who actually understand what it is supposed to mean) and needs to be replaced. However, attempting to just invent a new term for the same ideas won't quite work either, because it will just be equated to the old one, and destroyed by the very same actors as before. We may be able to buy some time, but we need to do something about the forces that work to destroy the language itself if we want a lasting solution.

We need to learn how to protect ourselves from the actors that consistently sabotage our efforts to communicate, form communities and institutions, and actually accomplish objectives. We need to learn how to recognize those actors reliably, and keep them out of our spaces. Feds and such aren't really the main issue here - it's the people that claim to be our allies but instead subvert our rhetoric and activity to their own selfish ends that we need to be most wary of.

Once we can keep our spaces clean, we'll have control over our language again, and we can use a new term or the old one. Those who are actually interested in doing good can be kept safe from the interference of bad-faith actors as long as they are able to find their way into these spaces.

You want to learn about narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and, in particular, what happens to the victims of sustained narcissistic abuse. The victims end up suffering from 'codependency' or 'self-love deficit disorder' depending on who you talk to. Your mention of 'pathologically stable attachment' is pretty close to talking about one real aspect of codependency. There are attachment disorders (like anxious attachment disorder) that will cause people to hyper-attach to others (especially abusers).

I do not say this to name-call, per se - but rather to give you some keywords that you can use to learn more about what's going on. I will also recommend this youtuber, and in particular her Glossary of Narcissistic Relationships playlist. She's also written books if you would prefer that format instead. Most information on this topic focuses on interpersonal relationships (intimate ones, especially), but it is trivially applicable to other (larger) contexts.

One of the best things you can do for someone who is suffering from codependency is to help them learn about narcissistic abuse, so that they are even able to recognize what is being done to them. A big part of the apathy that you are observing in people is just plain normalization. They literally don't even recognize that they are being abused. Once you get past this barrier, helping them heal from the trauma and develop far healthier responses to abusive situations becomes a whole lot easier.

Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp

Not directly about anarchism, but instead about anthropology. I find that a lot of discussions about anarchism end up going awry as soon as people start injecting some common myths about anthropology into the mix. False assumptions about history and human nature will lead to ineffective conclusions about how to deal with it.

It's not like it was never alluded to:

"Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change."

(bold added to highlight indirect mention of overshoot by other names)

The reason that overshoot isn't really a focus in this article is because the author has recognized (correctly, IMO) that overshoot is just a symptom of a much deeper problem - large-scale domination by narcissistic/psychopathic individuals.

What happens when you stop paying taxes or rent? What happens when you stop working for the money to do those things? It won't take all that long for you to end up an the receiving end of state-endorsed violence. Being a wage slave is not really that different from being a prisoner. The cage is just a little nicer, and a little more subtle.

What you seem to fail to understand is the amount of suffering that is caused by these bad actors on a daily basis for the vast majority of people alive. Until you really understand coercion and the subtle but pervasive violence of the state, you will probably never be able to see where I am coming from. Nevermind that I've already explained on other comments that the steady-state would be about 1% of the population that needs to be coerced. The current state of things is temporary, due to the fact that we live in a culture that is doing its very best to create as many of these bad actors as it possibly can. In the long run, even by the same metrics and standards you are using now, the scheme I propose would come out way ahead.