It's not clear to me that the risk to lean muscle tissue is unique to GLP-1 drugs. The counter point is that the risk exists in practically any severely calorie restricted plan. In other words, the reason why most treatments work is by reducing calories and if you reduce them too fast, any of those treatments will put lean body mass at risk.

When a patient loses weight, some fraction of that will always be lean muscle mass. The issue with GLP-1 drugs is that fraction tends to be higher than with other approaches to weight loss. See the link I posted above for details which should make the risk clear to you.

There are circumstances when those drugs are medically indicated. However, it seems they are being over prescribed without proper consideration of the harmful side effects.

The link doesn’t actually cover all the material listed, only the first 27 minutes. It looks like the relevant stuff came later.

Was that higher fraction compared to equally drastic calorie reduction in other methods in a RCT?

Basically yes, but there are nuances too complex to summarize in a brief comment here. If anyone is considering taking one of those drugs then I highly recommend subscribing to watch the entire video and read the show notes (including the linked scientific papers). There is a subscription fee but the it's a fraction of the price of the drugs and the information is top notch.

Can you link those articles directly? I have access to a lot of journal but it’s more out of curiosity than as a candidate for the drugs