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I dunno, but I can speculate – it might be that they have lots on hand. Also, it's good to stress-test reusable tech like Falcon 9 as much as possible to discover potential failures, and less costly to discover them with a smaller rocket.
I'd say we are already launching satellites en-masse. You'll note that Falcon Nine started launching in 2010 and started reusing its boosters regularly around 2018; the steep US vertical ascent starts in 2020. You can also compare to CubeSat launches by year (which is not omnidirectional, but broke 100/200/300 in 2014/2017/2021. Since (AFAIK) the low price point has a profit baked-in, I assume as long as they have demand they are profiting at that rate.
Kessler Syndrome happens on accident, of course. Orbit, especially outside of LEO, is really big, and satellites are teensy-tinsy and decay in orbit. So the answer is "tens of thousands" but also that you do have more risk of Kessler Syndrome as you get more up there. However, even if we reach a point where we say "no more satellites" we'll still need to put more up as the old ones decay. Presumably we'll need lots of rocket launches for whatever space exploration we're doing, and possibly (as discussed) for tasks like asteroid mining or even decommissioning old satellites so that Kessler Syndrome is less of a worry.
Obviously, Musk and his sort want to go to Mars and the rest of the solar system. If you're doing that the demand for mass is much more than could be accommodated by satellites (I would imagine), at least until you get onsite resource production up and running.
I don't particularly think Starship development is going poorly. Falcon 9 had a number of failures on early launch tests. Both of its first two launches failed in the recovery phase, and of the first seven, four had some form of a failure. Yet, as I think we've shown, it's matured into a tremendously successful launch vehicle. Musk's whole "move fast and break things" shtick, as I understand it, is built around accepting more risk up front in exchange for faster results. Starship has had three launches so far, with what appears to my untrained eye to be progressive improvement. Unless the costs of these failures are high enough to cause SpaceX to run out of funding (which I doubt – they're made out of stainless steel!) my presumption is that they will simply move past the failures, as they did with Falcon 9. Now, I wouldn't say it's impossible that Starship is found to be unworkable, or retired for other reasons. I just know that accepting and moving past failure is something SpaceX has historically done (and is normal in aerospace development) so without specific reasons to think otherwise I sort of assume that that will be the case here – although I can certainly imagine a number of reasons it might not be.
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