The Mercator projection was great for navigating oceans, baring remain correct. There are thousands of other map projections that do a better job preserving size, shape, directions, and distances. Any projection will be a tradeoff between these.

As far as I know the Mercator projection has mostly fallen out of use in education, and I don’t think there’s any standard that requires it anywhere. So I’m not sure exactly what this is about.

Only if it’s for the sake of destruction and cruelty, there’s more wood than we could possibly use on national forest and BLM land. AFAIK they’re only talking about national forests for now.