Industrial meat agriculture is killing us and the Earth ecosystem in manifold preventable ways if we'd just stop being so selfish and doing the same thing and expecting a different result:
You couldn't be more wrong. The overwhelming majority of people are against animal cruelty and creating more antibiotic resistance through cattle farming, even if it means slightly-to-modestly more expensive meat. The reason it continues is a failure to inform (seen the insides of many factory farms on the news lately?), organize, and act to that end. It is not because of selfishness that it continues (except the selfishness of those profiting from it, but there will always be someone selfish, no matter how selfless the average person gets), but because the virtuous have not gathered enough power to stop it (at home and especially abroad [1]).
> The overwhelming majority of people are against animal cruelty and creating more antibiotic resistance through cattle farming,
You're seem sure of yourself while being incredibly confused. Strawman fallacy. People may half-heartedly express some things like "they'd buy X if X existed at price Y" but then, time-after-time, they don't do it. Actions are all that matter and are the proof. The actions say most people are happy to maintain cognitive dissonance so long as they don't see how the sausage or hamburger is made. Some "less bad" alternatives are offered in some stores, but these aren't necessarily the standard or popular items because the customer is given the choice to buy Brazilian or American beef raised on CAFOs rather than banning them and banning feeding mostly corn diets altogether. Most consumers and most other buyers will simply choose the cheapest option available, no matter the externalities involved. The corporate meat industry encompasses a powerful lobby that has legal, legislative, and media power to maintain the status quo, and most Americans are low/no information consumers who are happy with (was cheap) fast food and don't think or care how it was produced because they're addicted to UPF. Only a small fraction (<~10%) even put a thought into how their choices matter and not all of those have the luxury to afford alternatives because the precariat are even more precarious these days. It would take radical socioeconomic and political change to undertake unpopular, necessary changes to reduce harm from existential threats. This won't happen until it's already too late and people are dying in massive numbers. Proactive harm reduction is avoided because too much kakisto-klepto-plutocratic forms of government are reactive because they don't care or are too stupid to care.
Fundamentally: the raising of animals for meat is impossible to regulate to assure anything close to uniform, humane conditions, biosecurity, and climate neutrality... because it necessitates suffering and resource intensive. People who are ideologically wedded to meat profiteering and consumption will espouse all sorts of bad arguments that there can be "organic, grass-fed" pseudo-permaculture-washed approaches possible, but it's really denying irreducible facts about growing large numbers of animals' cross-contamination with wildlife and people, feed inputs, waste pollution, and slaughtering them. There's no rehabbing a dirty industry except making it seem less bad with token, performative, greenwashing campaigns.
But they do vote for it. They vote for environmental laws that make products and food more expensive, they vote for animal cruelty laws that make food more expensive, they vote for tariffs to keep/re-shore industries that make products more expensive. Time and time again, they choose the more expensive options.
They only don't if the only "choice" you recognize is that of a consumer (and probably an uninformed consumer at that), not that of a citizen. Bot of course corporations would love it if the only action their opposition could take is in which products they consume.
