Were they really part of a "mass exodus" from a dying Earth?

That is the claim made by the opening line of the Wikipedia plot summary:

"The Avalon, a sleeper ship transporting 5,000 colonists and 258 crew members in hibernation pods, is traveling from Earth to the planet Homestead II, a 120-year journey as part of a mass exodus of Earth's population due to ecocide and the collapse of the biosphere.[8]"

I do not recall it that way (sounds more like "Blade Runner" tbh), but I wanted to solicit some other opinions before I edit the sentence in question. (BTW, that footnote leads to some scientific paper about postapocalyptic films, so it may be those authors who originally made what I see as a clear mistake in interpretation.)

I would say the strongest counterevidence is Aurora's story. She seems to have had a perfectly comfortable life on Earth, living in the Chrysler Building in NYC and having lots of friends who were sad she was leaving. Her plan was to go to Homestead II, live there for a year so she can write about it, then go back to Earth. Seems rather unlikely she would be planning to return if Earth was really in such trouble (and would be another couple centuries-plus further down the road to ruin by then).

So I had much more of the impression that this was like people leaving Europe to come to the US in the nineteenth century, or people from the East Coast going out West. Europe and the US East Coast still have plenty of people to this day (over half the population of the US still lives in the Eastern time zone), and are hardly barren smoking/starving ruins. But moving away from those places provided a lot of people greater opportunity, or at least that was their perception.