You could translate it as "a pair of pants", and that's the appropriate way to put it in English, but really it says "one pants".
I figure the most natural mistake to make when counting pants is to use 件, since that's the measure word that applies to "clothes", but you'd have to already know at least some Chinese in order to make that mistake.
They were not against more clothes for everyone - quite the opposite. They were against fast fashion bad quality clothes made in horrible conditions by people (or children) who had no other choice.
I thought this was a pretty good post about it: https://www.verysane.ai/p/against-the-luddites
In other words. The Luddites as elite group that fought to preserve status view is not entirely wrong, but also misses a lot.
In context of audience here - programmers (elite group). You can say that programmers fighting with AI do it to preserve their own status. Or we might trust those (like geohot) who are angry because it's just leading to bad results. It's enshitification - of the result, the working conditions, the ethics. The whole chain.
That's pants as opposed to skirts. It's a gender implication, not a scarcity one.
