Exactly! Not taking your PTO will create pressure for your coworkers to also pass over their PTO or work longer hours.

Don't set a bad precedent.

Yea, no. At my last job every project was constantly late because they kept over promising and clearly didn’t have enough people for what they committed to. I couldn’t even get a department meeting once a month for an hour because everyone was always “too busy”.

These projects always need everyone to commit to it like it’s a personal passion project because their goals are unreasonable. If they can’t handle someone being away for a day then the manager clearly cannot plan and/or the enployees need better training(in my case half of them were simply stubborn and ineffective on top of the questionable management). Sure, don’t take a week off right before a reasonably set deadline if the work’s not done but otherwise do whatever.

I had someone call me yelling because I was going to finish the job in exactly the amount of time I said it would take me, but I started a day late due to technical errors which made another project go over by a day(and that day I still stayed late to make sure things were done!). If you can’t take a day off then you also can’t be sick, and if managers don’t account for THAT obvious possibility then they are fucking stupid and awful managers, zero exceptions.

During a previous assignment, I was told that during the summer period I was going to be swamped with work, and I was asked, because I don't have kids, not to take a vacation in that period.
So I didn't and told them that I would take my vacation after the summer holiday period, in October. I told them this in May.

The summer period comes around, and it was the slowest period I had ever encountered. There was literally nothing for me to do. Meanwhile the project manager and a number of other people in my team, who had small kids, did take time off in the summer period. By the time it was October, the work had picked up again, and they complained that I was going to be on vacation in that period. The manager called me not a team player. I just told them that I held the fort when they told me to, and that I had communicated this vacation well ahead of time. They had had their relax time, now it was time for me.

I agree, I don't want to make things harder for my team members, but within reason. And what they asked of me wasn't reasonable.

Yes but a good manager will arrange a replacement for you after you inform them that you're putting in the PTO. It shouldn't fall on your shoulders.

If they can't find a replacement then they should hire more people and try to overstaff every single day so that there's always someone to cover. That's what my workplace does, and because of that there has never been an issue with me taking PTO whenever the hell I feel like it.