It is the material on the pans, but the only case where the companies making the stuff were successfully sued was when they were caught for dumping intermediates of the chemical in to a tributary of Ohio river.

It’s hard to pin down how impactful the coatings on the pans are because of how many other sources of these kinds of fluorocarbons are in house hold items, and in the environment due to large companies disposing of them recklessly. We know for a fact that basically everyone has some level of these compounds in them due to their ubiquity.

The pans are just one potential source and a particularly notable one because they’re in contact with food.