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

[Rosenstrauch]

From what I heard, the reason for taking out the Collectors was that the dev team were upset with how overused Harbinger was as a meme.

That is a massive shame. I liked Harbinger as a villain. I think I'd have preferred him over the Starchild.

Apparently there's a mod that does exactly what I wanted: Removes the Starchild and the Three(Four) choices entirely, replacing it with a modified version of the Destroy Ending. I say modified because it also removes EDI and the Geth's deaths (if you kept the latter alive), which is... well, I do like that there are negative consequences to eliminating the Reapers.

But yeah. A better foreshadowed solution would've definitely been preferred.