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

[Lauront]

To be entirely fair, Hydaelyn herself stated she's not 'the good guy' and constantly lamented/doubted her course of actions, whereas Emet and the other ascians couldn't care less if they tried and never hesitated to commit countless genocides. It's not much, but at least she's self aware rather than self righteous /shrug

I don't really buy that. She only ever explicitly apologises to the sundered, and speculating, I think in part it was because life after the sundering turned out to be worse than she could've imagined. Not the unsundered whose world she destroyed and whose people she ended, which she treats as a necessity. At that point, an apology that is brushed past by Y'shtola and never commented upon elsewhere means little to me.

I wouldn't call her acknowledgement of her crimes "constant". She does so once and Y'shtola immediately dismisses it at though we would have to be absolutely mad to even think for a second that she was in the wrong. The difference in the way the game treats two characters who both committed genocide is the issue here, not which one was more repentant. One is condemned to be a villain for trying to repair his world and, in the process, committing genocide. While the other betrays the very same world and splits it apart to begin with (incidentally, also knowingly creating the worlds the first character destroys). This is also committing genocide but is she a villain, like the other person was? No, now she's a hero and genocide is "OK" as long as it's being done for our benefit. And the game never lets you think for a second that this is not the right way to think or feel. It's a sickening double standard.

There is this too. Apologies are fine and all but at the end of the day she is responsible for all of this, including putting Emet in a position where he sees his world and people torn up inexplicably and reduced to forms he no longer recognises and struggles to relate to, knowing he'd go on to perform the Rejoinings with the rest of them. Yet the story treatment of the two could not be more of a polar opposite.