That's just whataboutism: If there's an alternative way of solving the same problem that generates less waste, why not use it?
I find the contactless coin form factor for single rides quite clever personally, and I don't see any downsides compared to paper single-use tickets (other than that validators and gates need some storage container to collect them, which could be tricky in buses).
Airline is not just whataboutism. It illustrates the absurdity of scale in your point. Imagine someone who is spending 20 minutes to save themselves 4 pennies on their electrical bill, but they are running 8 air conditioners with their windows open during a heatwave. Yes, that's whataboutism, but it's an informal fallacy, meaning I may still have a good point.
The antenna isn't, however. In any case, I think there's a pretty high chance these tickets will not end up in a dedicated recycling facility that can properly separate antenna from paper and recycle both, disregarding the chip.
For similar reasons, Japan is phasing out even magnetic stripe single-ride tickets out of recycling concerns (in favor of QR code based ones).
> Imagine someone who is spending 20 minutes to save themselves 4 pennies on their electrical bill
That's not an appropriate comparison, though. Buying a reusable token doesn't take 20 minutes more than buying a paper ticket.
Imagine instead a device manufacturer spending some months of R&D to help every single household in a large country save 4 pennies on their electrical bills, and it doesn't seem so absurd anymore.
No, but it could expend 20x the resources, and not be used 20x as much.
As the article mentions, the purpose of these paper tickets is for single-use or short term use, and the system also supports plastic cards for longer term use.
Lifetime of a plastic opus card may even be more wasteful, by mass of plastic and chip, if not used extensively. For example, one time use is often for tourists, where a full chip opus would be very wasteful indeed.