I think the gist of your response is that you think the standard should be “first prove it’s retained on dishes” before you remove a known harmful ingredient. I will reiterate that I disagree with this: the well-funded industry deploying the toxic ingredient should be responsible for proving that the toxic ingredient is washed clean. I feel this way for three reasons: (1) the industry chose the ingredient and thus should bear the burden of proving it’s safe, (2) the industry has more resources, (3) if this ingredient does prove dangerous, industry might select a new ingredient that is equally dangerous (and hence see point 1.) I don’t feel like your post provided me with much of a reason to change my opinion on this.
As far as MSG goes I’m not sure what that has to do with this issue. Clearly it would have been better if MSG had been well-studied early on, before concerns about it spread widely. This seems like an argument for investing in studies early. But even aside from that: this is not MSG. It’s a toxic ingredient that may or may not evaporate.
Btw, MSG is found naturally in a bunch of stuff, like the seaweed used in various parts of Chinese and Japanese cuisine. So it's not something a well funded industry invented like artificial sweeteners. (for which it seems no amount of study can stop the bad memes)
Much like yogurt, it's made by fermentation. Much like table salt, it was discovered to be delicious by people putting just about everything in their mouths back in the day. It can be said that MSG was in the process of being well-studied early on when the sensationalized news fouled up the whole process and made people unnecessarily afraid of something no more harmful than table salt.
Decades and tens to hundreds of papers later, the sensationalized story is still winning in the minds of people who don't understand how science works and don't know where most of the stuff around them comes from. This is the problem with overreacting to a headline. You might be doing yourself a favor health wise, possibly, but you might also be demanding millions of restaurants redesign their menus to feed you less healthy, less delicious food, for no good reason.
The problem is, you don't know. That's why it's okay to take a single paper with a grain of salt.
I think what you are asking for is generally the status quo actually. Industry does not generally choose ingredients so casually without any study at all. And regulators generally require prospective studies on possible harmful effects to people and environments before new compounds can be introduced to products people use all the time. That is most of what the FDA and EPA are up to.
The problem is, people can be wrong. Scientists have bias too. Sometimes people see trends in data not because it's valid but because that's what they were consciously or sub-consciously hoping to find. Even on review of the work by industry and regulatory panels, people still make mistakes. Products still sometimes have effects no one knew about or intended. On top of that, everything is lethal in sufficient quantities. Even water will kill you through electrolyte depletion if you drink enough a once.
My point is just that science is hard, studies are deliberately narrow and careful to try and add one tiny little fact to the pile of all human knowledge. And even then, most early findings turn out to be wrong in various ways or get refined in a way that makes excited reactions later seem overblown. It takes a long time to prove anything like the broad statements we tend to find in sensationalized news coverage. So while caution is fine, immediately assuming that one small study just recently published, yet to be replicated successfully, using a methodology that leaves a huge number of variables open to question between the lab environment and the real world use cases, is just not something to get too excited about.
Maybe the companies that work on rinse aids will want to follow up this line of research and answer some of those questions...but let's be honest, if you're already assuming the product is harmful based sensationalized news, are any follow up papers funded by the interested parties really going to change your mind? Are you even going to look for those papers six months to a year after you toss out your rise aid and demand your favorite restaurants do the same?
If you want to find the studies you would like industry to be doing, I'm sure they are available. Most of the scientific studies out there have something to do with testing products that exist or finding new things to make into new products.
It's just that most studies of anything at all are not terribly sensational. Like, how boring a headline is "dish soap company finds new detergent compound that binds to grease 2% better than the most commonly used compound, no immediately obvious side-effects, more study needed for FDA approval"?
As far as MSG goes I’m not sure what that has to do with this issue. Clearly it would have been better if MSG had been well-studied early on, before concerns about it spread widely. This seems like an argument for investing in studies early. But even aside from that: this is not MSG. It’s a toxic ingredient that may or may not evaporate.