Here's the real truth: the stigma of plastic surgery is silly.
Is it a good thing? Perhaps not, not exactly. But so often people take the worst case scenario and minimize things. Reconstructive surgery is good, very good, in fact essential. It's made many lives better.
The types of surgery MJ wanted? Are not quite as net positive but they are truthfully, net neutral. MJ was not clayface, not made of plastic. Changing his face, was just that, changing.
He sculpted himself because he was unhappy. And wanted to look like the most successful man of all time. And it actually did work there. MJ in 1983 looks just majestic. The most interesting man in the world. The mystique there was truly otherworldly.
You can say it went farther than we'd like but he still kept control for a while. But MJ still had imperfections, was an imperfect man. An immuno-compromised one in fact. And that caught up with him. Lupus and Vitiligo together started to become, overwhelming. Taking on surgery with lupus is dangerous, and what happened to him, we see, has to do with that.