These should be banned
Agreed. As somebody who vapes, myself, it drives me crazy seeing discarded batteries littering the streets around here. The only legitimate use I've seen for disposable vapes was for use in prisons. There's a company that makes disposable vapes that are designed with intentionally flimsy materials, so that no part of it can be fashioned into a weapon or be used to start fires.
But for the average, non-incarcerated user, there's no excuse for it. They're more expensive in the long run, and far worse for the environment. If you're gonna vape, just buy yourself a proper mod kit, where there is much less waste produced.
It's impossible to quantify such a claim right now. Lemmy instances are still largely poorly-ranked in search engine rankings. For instance, I can search for a comment that I've written on Lemmy from months ago, word for word in quotes, and Google can't actually find it anywhere. It's a string of text that has no other results, either.