I agree, but you're going too far saying NIMBYs are scum. They are defending their interests, just like the companies that want to locate equipment in the neighborhoods. Also the microcell sites are hideous and noisy. They normally consist of a large number of boxes mounted on a telephone pole with a spaghetti mass of cable interconnecting them. There is no way the Bell System would have offered that mess. It's symptomatic of a post-industrial society.

Telecom has been taken over by purely profit-seeking players and the result is a zero-trust, adversarial relationship. Part of the zero-trust is that the residents lose all bargaining power after the thing is installed, so they are incentivized to fight as hard as possible up front. Ironically the telecoms spend a large amount on legal fees to force these eyesores into communities (I forget my source for this), instead of spending it to engineer an attractive and quiet solution.