It’s worth noting that waste wise reusable rockets are very rare. You have falcon 9, which doesn’t reuse its second stage, and electron, which I don’t believe has caught a second stage yet. Maybe the space shuttle by technicality, though that was more of a refurbishment that proper reflight, or buran, by an even more generous margin.

There are other reusable rockets planed such as new glen and vulcan, but nither of those have made it as far as starship has. Of the dosen or so currently active orbital rockets, there are only two that can be reused in any meaningful capacity, and they both don’t recover the second stage.

What your seeing is a design strategy known as “fail faster”, and is hardly unique to Musk. While it is worrying to see this silicon valley “brilliance” slowly seep into the real world instead of just entertainment software, given that starship is not only unmanned but likely to stay that way for some time it’s not that worrying in general.

Well mostly, part of the reason that the first test flight was surprising is that the seemed to have miscalculated the speed of the flight termination system, which does effect people on the ground, but this launch did show that it’s been fixed. Tasking several flights to make orbit is also pretty common for non maned space flight.