Actually, no. When O’Neill proposed it, it was doable at that time. It makes the ISS look like a tinker toy and would truly permanently put man into space. With that space station we could easily launch from the moon or space station orbit to access the asteroid belt for mining, the moon for water,etc. No gravity well.
I read O’Neill’s book when it came out. His cylinder habitations in space were doable in concept, but they would have taken many years of development and sustainment at a prohibitive cost with no clear economic value when accomplished. I believe that continues to be so. For all the promotion by NASA, the ISS is of at best negligible economic value.
It always kills me when people are discussing ways to bring things put up there back down. Since it’s so expensive to get stuff UP there, the “disposal method” should be cheap, reusable or ion/scavenged material driven propulsion units that will push the stuff to higher orbit, like a geostationary or Lagrange point junkyard, or push it to the moon to an area most likely to be amenable to building a base there.
They want to accelerate the decommissioning of the ISS now, and precisely due to the fact that it’s got a bunch of components wearing out, suffering cracks, etc it is THE best laboratory for people to get field experience dealing with failure in space. It’s not going to be an enjoyable experience to try to deal with an ad hoc repair or failure half way to Mars or during return...