People can wear clothes, shoes, glasses and jewellery 16 hours/day for decades, can work with thin food-protective or thick hand-protective gloves on for hours every day. Even when people suffer from chapped or sore skin problems with gloves, as some do, they still manage to do it because the value of (being employed, or being able to work with delicate or dangerous things) makes it worth enduring.

I don't know anything about VR and the biological costs of using it, but why is it necessarily more harsh on the body than glasses and headphones and gloves? Future-VR is likely to get smaller and lighter, like current VR is smaller and lighter than Steve Mann's 1980s and 1990s wearables. Won't there come a point where it's just .. light and easy and mostly fine?

Sebaceous glands and sinuses are going to be problems for as long as humans vaguely resemble other apes. Those are the sorts of problems you're up against, combined with the basic optics problems. Don't you think that if there was an easier way to put the required visual field in front of the eye closer, with a lighter lens, that wouldn't have been already done? There's some basic optics problems that fix the solution space in ways that are not great the particular sack of meat that biology produced.