(MAJOR SPOILERS) Just beat Endwalker MSQ...

[Iscah]

The problem with Venat/Hydaelyn's decision is that it seems that what we actually saw her do on screen is not, at a broad-scale intent level, what the writers apparently set out to portray her doing, which was for the Sundering to be utterly necessary and the only long-term way to save humanity, making it a harsh but necessary act that she took the burden of carrying out. We're clearly intended to see her as someone who has suffered for the good of humanity because she cares about them.

Unfortunately the details of the portrayal just don't work well, other parts of the narrative work at cross-purposes to it, and she comes out of it looking much worse than the writers seem to want her to appear.

I think they went into it with an odd clash in their base philosophy – that idea they lean on that "our struggles make us strong, and people who never experience that don't have the same strength" makes some degree of sense in our world where it's simply an inevitability of life, but to take it that step further and say that "suffering had to be introduced to the world because of this" is just jarring and makes the whole narrative awkward, and is not the lofty philosophical concept they try to sell it as.

Perhaps it's all because they wrote themselves into a corner in the first place by creating the "perfect" Ancients without really having a good answer why they had to be torn down from that position, and having to come up with the link afterwards. I think a lot of the awkward parts of this story's narrative come from all these pre-established fragments invented for different narratives at their own time, which now need to be fused together even though they don't sit comfortably.

(Though they haven't even done a great job of that, what with dropping the entire "Hydaelyn fought and sundered Zodiark" narrative presented to us most recently by Emet in Shadowbringers, so it's not just Hydaelyn making the story up. And it makes it feel like the overarching story of the last four expansions got abandoned at the final reveal.)