This is a contentious topic, and I am a latecomer to the discussion. That being said, I believe my data science background can shed some insights.
Let's talk about English Ivy, Hedera helix. It's native to Europe and has spread in North America. Notice that the observation densities below are quite similar. This is a screenshot from iNaturalist. The iNaturalist user densities in the USA and Europe are similar, so this is minimally affected by bias.
On iNaturalist, there are two main ways that people document insect-plant interactions. The first one is through the "Associated Species with Names Lookup" tag, the second is with the "Interaction->Visited Flower" of tag. Here's the distribution of both of these tags. (I've taken the liberty to filter the "Associated Species with Names Lookup" to show only observations with insects, as some users use this field to show plant-plant associations).
Associated Species with Names Lookup (I manually limited this to insects).
Interaction-> Visited Flower of (automatically limited to pollinators)
As you can see, North America clearly has more observations using these fields.
Now, time for the experiment. If Hedera helix is used by pollinators equally in Europe and North America, then we should see more observations of Hedera helix visiting flowers in North American than in Europe. In fact, we find the reverse:
Associated Species with Names Lookup (Limited to insects visiting Hedera helix). 1,389 observations of 339 species in Europe, 21 observations of 14 species in North America, 0 in the American Southeast. Note: more than 1,000 of the European observations are from one property.
Interaction->Visited Flower of (Limited to pollinators visiting Hedera helix). 470 observations of 130 species in Europe, 7 observations of 6 species in North America, 0 in the American Southeast.
The ratio of observations to species can give us a good idea of how complete the dataset is. In North America, the ratio of 3observation/2species indicates that there is much data left to collect. So I'm not trying to claim that Hedera helix supports no pollinators. I'm actually quite interested in studying which insects pollinate it in North America. But there isn't much data to study, because pollinators don't visit Hedera helix flowers often in North America.
This data does show that Hedera helix has dramatically different ecosystem function in North America vs Europe. This, in my opinion, is the lynchpin of the discussion. The question is whether the origin of plants matters. It does. This is one random example that shows when a highly ecologically productive plant is brought from one area of the world to another, it loses most of its ecological productivity.
I anticipate there may be pushback to this, for a few reasons. Most importantly, this is just one piece of the puzzle, and it's foolish for me to expect thoughtful people to suddenly change their long-held positions just because of a blog.
Respectfully,
Nate