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

[Teraq]

I don't see this much wrong with the Steppes situation personally. Admittedly I haven't gone through SB in a long time, but it just seemed to me like all of them were cool with letting foreigners with an obvious agenda participate in their Stupid Game™, in which said foreigners won the Stupid Prize™, and then the whole three tribes (unless the Buduga also fought in the war? I can't remember) that Hien actually got to participate in his war fully consented to it. Basically all of it seems based on the Proud Warrior Race Guy trope, which... when applied to an obvious fictional version of Mongols is certainly something. But within the context of the story I'm not sure what is wrong. We played their game according to their rules, they lost, gg. I don't see it as very different from recruiting mercenaries – only they would have probably refused money, so we paid them in Blood and Honor and Warrior's Pride.

I feel like mentioning that, as far as I can recall, none of the Naadam stuff was in the Xaela's original lore as it was presented during HW. What little we had of it, at least. It did weird me out in SB that suddenly they had this yearly competition that would result in the tribes having a leader of sorts.