Personal thoughts:
Where DT failed on its execution for me is where it did a variation on what failed miserably in both ShB and EW: namely that Ishikawa wrote those two stories hinging on our WoL liking Emet Selch as a character, feeling sympathy for him and his goals of reviving his dead world, and that Elpis needs your WoL to feel the lingering friendship of Azem with him and Hythlodeaus and the regret that our goals are at odds. Wuk Lamat treats Sphene exactly as the MSQ forced your WoL to treat Emet. Both Sphene’s plan for the Endless and the Ascians are attempting to sacrifice entire worlds worth of lives in a plan that was flawed from the outset and could never accomplish the states goal- and said goal is failed necromancy. The Endless are incomplete counterfeit ghosts and the Ancients’s souls, as Fandaniel and Gaia proved, can’t scrub clean the memories and trauma they have accumulated. And Living Memory is a theme park blatant in its artificial idealized nature, a less-subtle repeat of the false assertion of the UnSundered World as a paradise with no deep systemic problems to address.

Alexandria does have the parallel to AI and the massive unsustainable resource drain that it causes and that the final zone is really about how funerary practices and remembering the dead are about giving closure to the living, not for the dead. Said nuances don’t alter that fact that I want to forget and erase Emet’s character and any cloying sentimentality towards to UnSundered. So Sphene and the Endless are a retread, with predictable mostly negative feedback. But it also has the FFIX nostalgia. And that works for IX fans but is only a fandom subset.