Seems to me, "pure bloodymindedness" is an error, or at least an error-producing state of mind. And the decision to disable critical safety systems was an error.

These errors were made by humans.

But, whatever.

If this was the case, how do you explain the fact that independent of some large-scale environmental insults which left temporary reductions in species there has generally been ever increasing numbers of species filling ever greater numbers of evolutionary niches.

Granted, humans are now doing a bang-up job of wiping them out, but we will either learn how to stop doing that, and thus survive alongside what's left. Or keep doing it until the whole ecosystem is screwed (for us) and we die out, leaving the remaing species to fill up all the niches again, as they have always done, because that is what evolution does - fill the niches.