CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat

Not necessarily.

It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts, but there's also reasonable data indicating that less processing results in better health outcomes.

I’ve seen very little that isn’t just correlation of highly processed food consumption and generally poor lifestyle

Here, this is a solid intro you can thread out of at your leisure. There's really no controversy around this at a scientific level, only on social media:

https://www.thelancet.com/series-do/ultra-processed-food

But of course there is! That's not the point. You could also probably produce reasonable data indicating that food starting with the letter F results in worse health outcomes. But if you then avoid fenugreek, fava beans and fiddlehead ferns, you're not making up for the fried potatoes, fried cheese and fudge sundaes which really carried the correlation!

We want causal correlations. Someone decided that instead they wanted to divide food into categoried in this specific way, and then rank categories. And I don't think all of them were naive about what they were doing. I've read Merchants of Doubt, I don't give harmful industries the benefit of doubt when it comes to things like this.

You can wait for causal connections forever while reasonable people take precautions when seeing strong correlations.