What would the path be had you been able to contain the light?

[Cleretic]

I've said this before, but I think the most critical thing to understand about Emet in Shadowbringers is that he's not behaving rationally. During the expansion, he constantly makes contradictory statements about his own beliefs and even his goals - originally he alludes to the "path of lesser tragedy" being about avoiding the Rejoinings, but by the time you're going to confront Vauthry and it seems as though he might actually have to reckon with being proven wrong, he's trying hard to persuade you they would actually be a good thing and that you and the people you love don't have to suffer for them to happen. He also pivots wildly between how much sympathy he has to the Sundered, sometimes calling them subhuman beings and seeming enraged by the very fact they exist, and at other times regarding them affectionately. It's never explicit outside of the Tales Of stories, but he's obviously wracked with self-loathing as a result of his actions, but also feels compelled out of duty to his people to keep pushing forward. He's stuck between a rock and a hard place - he wants more than anything to stop, but can't bring himself to do so.

Yeah, a big thing with Shadowbringers Emet is that while he's often truthful, he's not always honest, and as a result he spends a lot of the expansion subtly twisting his arguments and perspective to do whatever he's trying to achieve in that scene, which is usually just trying to make the Scions question their preconceptions and convictions. This makes it pretty hard to take him at his word with regards to any of his actual plans, a lot of what he said about it was subtly contradictory and lacking in detail... because his goal wasn't consistency or specificity, it was to make you think he had a point.

The Ascians as a whole, and Emet specifically, gain a lot from the fact their plan never faced the scrutiny of actually having to happen on-screen. It's very unclear how much he actually cares about the sundered, if they really think this is a kindness to anyone except their own people, how they deal with the Thirteenth, what even happens after the final Rejoining, how many sacrifices have to happen to make all this finish, if the Amaurot they bring back is really ever the same, if they can ever be trusted to not keep sacrificing... but the Ascians never actually had to answer those questions, because they all died before then, so their plan remains an unquestioned theoretical. That's similarly true of Emet's 'test' to us; it doesn't matter what he would've done if he was wrong and we 'passed' his arbitrary test, because we didn't.