I personally cannot stand Zenos in any game, but I can see why SE uses him, he is one of their cookie-cutter "neckbeard with a big sword" villains. I could totally picture him in the real world hacking at melons in his front lawn cause "katana is best sword and no one messes with me or my big katana cause I will cut you down to defend my waifu" ...you know the type. Sephirot is their biggest example of this archetype. And you can make as many arguments as you want about his motivations, but when it comes down to it, he is nothing but an incel with a big sword and mommy issues, it people eat it up for some reason.

But SE loves their cringy villains (and heroes), because they appeal to a small but very very loud and vocal group. I had hopes with Iceheart, and again with Yutsu, and then again with Emet, but nope, they are all killed off the moment their stories got really good only to be replaced with the weird Naruto kid in math class and I become the Witcher meme of "/sigh ...f---" It's like SE is scared of having a really well developed villain that had motivations beyond "look at my big sword! come at me bro! cackles in bad anime villain tropes" which is sad.

The story always gets super good, then we revert back to something like Zenos.