What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[anhaato]

But Zodiark shielded them from Meteion. And we know that even while sundered he shielded them for 12000+ years. That isn’t really on the verge of killing itself. The planet was thriving at that point where are you getting this information?

I mean, yeah, that's exactly why they failed. In making us sympathize with the Ascians over Shadowbringers they made Zodiark into a Not Actually Evil god, thus writing themselves into a hole that made it hard to justify why what Venat did was good. When they made Zodiark neutral at worst, the introduction of "oh the world was gonna die anyway" didn't really stick. Instead of accepting that Hydaelyn is now a morally gray figure at best (allowing us to defeat an intergalactic world-ender, at the price of ending a civilization) they tried and failed to retcon that back to Hydey good Zodey bad world gonna die (I feel like YoshiP was partly responsible for this) and it fell apart. This is intent vs result, my point.