Doesn't matter if it's people or not, it's irrelevant to the point. Just the fact you would casually lob nukes around cause you can is completely antithetical to what Fallout was originally supposed to be about and stand for. Note that this idiocy isn't completely new, Bethesda put in a mini-nuke weapon as early as Fallout 3. Now they've just taken it to a new level.
But you pretty much said it yourself, the mere notion that you would lob a nuclear missile just to irradiate areas so you can create new "valuable resources" is completely laughable. That isn't Fallout, it's a parody of Fallout.
I'm loath to link to Kotaku, but this article probably does a much better job of explaining some things than I could:
https://kotaku.com/fallout-76s-approach-to-nukes-seems-like-a-shift-for-th-1826744659