To clarify: I'm not talking about if pets in general can give emotional support to their owners, of course they can.
I mean should the concept of Emotional Support Animals get treated with the same level of respect and seriousness as that of regular Service Animals for the physically disabled.
Emotional support animals are not the same as trained service animals. And esa is just your doctor saying "having this animak around helps with bob's mental health symptoms." Service animals are trained to perform specific tasks like checking blood sugar, detecting seizures, assisting blind people, or aiding in mobility.
There's a lot of backlash against esas bc people take animals that are completely untrained in to public settings and the animals, being completely untrained, cause all kinds of problems. Actual service animals are very carefully trained not to cause problems
This sounds like a problem with a relatively obvious solution, which is to find a way to train specialized ESA pets.
Some countries do, of course that makes it very difficult to get one (the vast vast majority of support animals wash out of training for reasons that seem trivial but would be a real problem in context)