in order for it to be scaremongering, there must be a concerted effort to effect a sense of terror in the reader, and that sense of terror must be unwarranted. There is certainly an effort to terrify, but that is because the story is, objectively, terrifying.
they claim that bananas have more than 80 chemicals, and that the idea of counting distinct chemicals is a bad way to represent danger. As they point out, in biological systems, they would be correct, because biological systems have thousands of unique chemicals within them as a matter of course. However, they are trying to equate that banana to this issue, which is NOT a biological system, but an issue of plastic synthesis. In plastics manufacturing, there is no conceivable reason for you to need more than, to be generous, ten individual chemical constituents to form your polymer product. These might be the original polymer, very small amounts of the unbound monomer, a plasticizer or two, a couple dye compounds, and a couple other things which add properties you want, such as UV resistance, hydrophilia/phobia, or physical/chemical resistance. So, by divorcing this number from its context (plastics manufacturing), this person is trying to make it seem like a ridiculous headline, when in fact there is no conceivable reason to need even a quarter of the various impurities present in these bits of plastic. To give a much closer analogy than a fucking banana, imagine if I gave you a chunk of "steel", and told you that it's good, because it's "recycled", so I made some forks and knives out of it and gave it to you to eat with, but then you found out that it is actually an alloy of iron with a mixture of every other metal, including unsafe amounts of cadmium, mercury and lead. Even if you don't know what metals exactly are in it, it would be concerning if I just said "hey, this steel in your fork contains 50 different metals!", right? That's because that statement alone tells you that something very fishy was going on with the "recycling" process, because the only conceivable reason for there to be 50 different metals in detectable amounts in your steel (which, I remind you, you are eating off of) is if they just melted a bunch of shit together and called it "close enough".
I likened this person's attitude to Robert Kehoe, who was famously bribed by the leaded gas industry to lie to the world about the natural amount of lead in the environment. By claiming that the "normal" amount of lead was the same as the "natural" amount of lead, he cast scientific doubt over the question of leaded gas for many years. It wasn't until Clair Patterson proved that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, water and soil had gone up by tens of thousands of times since the pre-industrial steady-state levels that people finally saw Kehoe for what he was: a corrupt hack.