Might an intelligent species such as ourselves be rapidly heading towards extinction?
Humanity might go extinct, but if so, that would likely be due to a natural catastrophe like a major asteroidal impact or a relatively nearby supernova. Self-inflicted damage as with climate change or nuclear war wouldn't likely kill off humanity, just cause an extreme correction as seen in dystopian, post-apocalyptic movies like Road Warrior.
Could germ warfare or runaway AI - two manmade threats - lead to human extinction? Maybe.
You call Homo sapiens intelligent, and we are in the sense that we have explicit symbolic reasoning (thinking in words and mathematics) and technology, but scientific and other intellectual advances are the work of a small fraction of the species. Most of mankind is impulsive, prone to superstition and magical thinking, fairly uneducated beyond reading and arithmetic, unable to think critically, short-sighted, tribal, and prone to bigotry.
Regarding man considered collectively, it appears that he is not smart enough to avoid catastrophe.
Regarding avoiding climatic catastrophe, too late. It's here now. The question is to what degree and at what rate it will continue to worsen before man is crippled sufficiently to be forced to stop worsening the matter. Although it has come as a huge surprise to many including me, man will not do better than that.
Regarding avoiding political catastrophe, look at the recent American elections and the global trend of humanity to regress into authoritarianism, theocracy, misogyny, etc..
If we want representative images of these two opposing ways of viewing and engaging reality and society from popular culture, look to Lord of the Flies. There were two cultured, educated, gentle people and a majority that resembled what I just described. Or think of the recent mask and vaccine wars and the two intellectual and emotional temperaments exhibited there. Or the division of America into MAGA and non-MAGA.
If so, might we eventually be compelled to accept another option; a metamorphosis from "caterpiller"-like behaviour to "butterfly"-like behaviour that is far less destructive to the Earth?
The good news is that as long as the culture is preserved and knowledge of past mistakes is not lost, it is reasonably likely that the remnant will rebuild a better world than the one lost to them. That might qualify as the metamorphosis to which you refer, but I don't see it happening proactively. If it occurs, it will be a reaction to the conditions imposed on man by his prior errors.
It's all good from a transhuman perspective. The planet and the remaining life on it would benefit from human extinction, and to a lesser and less permanent extent, to a crippling of human technology without extinction. Analogous to the recent political cries of country over party, how about an attitude of life over species.