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

[AziraSyuren]

In this case, it's the same thing.

As I said, the writers were trying to convey the idea that a life without suffering is either impossible or delusional. That's the entire reason we see the Ancients during the Final Days panicking and longing to go back to the way things were. The argument is that, without a life of suffering to make them "stronger", the Ancients were ill-prepared for when it finally came. Thus, they were doomed to fall into even more delusional and blissfully-ignorant dreams of "utopia" if they ever got their paradise back.

I could spend all day unpacking the faults with this philosophy, why it doesn't quite work as the writers intended, and why it's potentially harmful, but my point at the moment is just to explain why, to the story's logic, the Ancients were painted as "delusional".

I don't think it's the same thing. I think the story was attempting to portray the Ancients constantly trying to undo their suffering rather than living on and learning from it, which supposedly would've led directly to them being unable to stop the Final Days should Zodiark falter. However, we were never actually shown that and just left to infer it from the potential third sacrifice, a few lines of dialogue in the last Elpis cutscene, and the last dungeon in the Dead Ends, so there's not nearly enough reason to believe that that's the case.