The Worst Part of Endwalker

[Kolsykol]

Zodiark was just a primal, that was confirmed in Shadowbringers.
He was never a dark lord reigning over the Ascians he was essentially a tool created by the Ancients to stop an unknown threat.

Meteion really wasn't a big bad either she was a victim of circumstance, she didn't really have any real autonomy.
Hermes was the closest to an actual villain.
Thinking of Meteion as the villain is a mistake, and I don't necessarily think that Hermes even was a villain either he was just very troubled and flawed living in a world full of '' perfect '' god-like beings.
And he also made decisions in the moment, if he had let Emet take Meteion away then the decision would've been made for him I dunno if he'd make the same decision even if he had more time to think about it.
Venat at least thought he might tho because that's one of the main reasons she never tells anyone, because Hermes was integral to forestalling the Final Days and he'd likely turn against her if it came out ( not to mention they had false memories and were already divided, people wouldn't just flock to Venat things would more likely just escalate the Final Days ).

In the end of the day it was a more human tragedy and I think on some level it makes sense it'd have such disastrous consequences when an Ancient flips out.
Especially one with knowledge over a mostly unknown force like Dynamism that the Ancients couldn't even control.

Yeah, Zodiark definitely felt throwaway after 8 years of build 2013-2021. The way Ascians spoke about the "one true god" made it seem like there was a plan all along, but the writers had no plan on where it was all going. The build eventually lost momentum when that became clear, then they finally brought it back into focus and hurriedly concluded it in a way that felt like another routine boss disposal.

It's pretty hard for anything to rival the threat level of ARR's titanic primal Bahamut which scarred the land so deeply that maps had to be redrawn, and it would happen again if we allowed its body to be regenerated in the Coils. There are story reasons for why Zodiark and Hydaelyn are much weaker than they once were in legend, but it's still disappointing for Hyd - a primal so exceptional as to have created an artificial moon and intelligent lifeforms - to have a battle that's anything but exceptional. Total mismatch between what was expected and what we got.

That's because they were tempered.
Which is another reason why Venat would've had a really hard time too.
Emet even says it himself in Shadowbringers that Zodiark tempered them, I think it may have been seen as sort of a necessary evil to try and unify people to save the Star.

We learn in EW that the Ascians at least intentionally taught people to instil the want to spread the '' faith '' of the Primals when they taught others about summoning.
They seem to have done this with Zodiark too and basically got caught in a loop of suicidal sacrifice with no real way going back.

It makes sense why they'd talk about Zodiark the way they did, the context just changes when we learn the truth behind it.