I have wrestled with this as well. Especially when reading Christians writing about the problems with "Capitalism". I'm sure you have heard the arguments around economic development in developing countries. The TLDR being factory workers are paid pennies to do this work, yet it is much better than the subsistence farming they did before. And as you say, abstaining from buying goods on a mass scale could result in a worse outcome.

Another lesson we fail to learn is US child labor. It wasn't the government that stopped it. It was prosperity. In most parts of the world people work to not starve. We don't work our kids because we can afford not to first and foremost. If a society can't the alternative is starvation.

I think it's good to wrestle with these concepts vs just blaming capitalism or saying it's all good and let them sort it out with little thought.

I don't have an answer either but rather I find the responses by the two sides pretty unimpressive. The free market argument seems more logical to me though. But, US based corporations use politics to manipulate local governments to possibly exploit their workers and the US gov for presure in trade arrangements. So with that in mind we are not talking about pure free trade. My guess is pure free trade would be vastly superior to the status quo. To me the big mistake on both sides is thinking we have true free trade today. We don't. But it's a scale not a boolean. The closer we get to 100% free trade the better. That's my gut instinct at least.