I was thinking those proper metal ones, but if we're talking about some extremely thin aluminium straws then I'd more worry about how well they'd handle and if there's some other worries about them. Lots of metal trash probably

That’s where you’re going? Out of the billions of straws used every day, you’re concerned about the edge case where it’s medically useful? By all means go for the plastic single use. Medicine is a huge user of that and there’s no realistic alternative. Hospitals and nursing homes get universal exemptions. It’s also a tiny fraction of single use plastic straw waste.

Thats something I wasn’t aware of, but clearly there are medical needs. I’m still confident that’s a small minority.

You’re right that we need to stop trying to make things binary, like a blanket prohibition. But we should be able to just say no to casual use of single use plastic straws and the remaining exceptions are probably no big deal. It’s not the hundreds of thousands of medically useful single use plastic straws every day that are the problem. But the hundreds of millions, or billions, of casual use