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

[CrownySuccubus]

Yeah, Occam's Razor suggests that that scene was yet another retcon, along side Venat's "faction" sundering the world to keep Zodiark in check, and Tempering being an intentional defect of the Ascian's design instead of what primals inherently do.

Because if this was Venat's own self-propaganda, the "I did this with the blessings of other like-minded Ancients who believed their brothers had gone too far" would have helped her case.

But yeah, the entire scene was just stupid. Like you said, it throws the Ancients under the bus to make Venat "right". If Elpis had done its job properly and actually made the Ancients feel "scary", like intended, that scene wouldn't have been necessary. But no, they had to try one last time to drive in the "Ancients bad" nail and it "succeeded" only by way of character assassination.

Elpis in general was just a disaster of writing. All of the flaws that exist in EW can be traced back to the decision to go there and then come up with some sort of plot device (Memory-Wiping Tech that only Hermes knows about/can use! How convenient!) to justify why the rest of FFXIV still happens.