(SPOILERS) The Garlemald Empire was right

[Caffekon]

And the dev team, rightly so, changed lore to paint it as a sinister plot from Emet-Selch.

But are they really that bad? Consider the following.

Magic is ultimately an evil spectrum, you manipulate reality itself to cast and build non-beings, you mix it with technology and you're even able to lure a lesser moon into crashing against Earth. Millions of people have died due to crafts of magick and its resulting wars, or literal races of lesser beings became enslaved to a powerful primal, all in the works of magic.

Calamities? Magic.
War of the Magi? Magic.
Bahamut? Magic.
Beast Tribes? Magic.
Bozja? Magic.
Eureka? Magic.
Alexander? Magic.
End of the world? Magic.
The ancient monster that brought the destruction of billions of people in a hundred different stars? Magic.

By its inability to use magic, Garleans understood that Hydaelin could never reach a complete and fair state of nature, as it is in the real world, bleak as the Earth can be, all of our strife was ultimately led by human stupidity or machinations of nature, things of which were researched and understood through empirical observation. But that's not the case in Hydaelin! And the Garleans deeply understood that failure of logic, and sought a world where magic influence and spirits were in their rightful place: Creations of our imagination. Although there were some racism and military brutality involved, in the end, the Garleans tried to establish a united world free from the spirits and the brutally powerful beings of magic that killed millions of people and creatures throughout history.

So yeah, magic should be a minor nuisance only found in the darkest corners of the known world and its use restricted to help mortal civilization, such as industry and healing, and not a mainstream cultural thing present in all governments. The unity under the Garlean banner would usher in a new era of peace, order, and justice throughout Hydaelin.

Not even mentioning the gigantic technological advances that Garlean rule would bring not only in the military sense but for quality of life!

Glory to the Empire!

Beyond majestic mountains
Across the emerald dale
On march the ivory standard
United we prevail
From distant shores of Othard
To lakes of Aldenard
The light of mighty Garlemald
For e'er our guiding star
Beneath the lofty heavens
With tired hands we toil
In iron do we clad our hearts
And cloudless are our souls
Yet every trial suffered
And every ally mourned
Do bring us solidarity
Our spirits stand untorn
Behold the boundless legions
Whose wings embrace the sun
Their fire rains down upon the land
Until their course is run
By mercy of Lord Galvus—
The pride within us all—
Shall we be granted victory
For glory, Garlemald

[Hainiryun]

I think you're coming at this from a weird angle. The stated intention of the empire were never to erradicate magic or anything like that. They used stopping Primal summoning specifically as a justification for their conquest. Just because the Garleans lack aptitude for magic didn't really make the empire inherently opposed to it. Magitek was just a way of leveling the field against other nations which had more ready access to magic and had used it to persecute the Garleans in the past. Once those peoples were conquered they had no problem for example employing conscripted mages as another tool for their armies.

This also sort of implies that the Garleans would see magic as somehow unnatural which isn't really a thing, magic is innate to the setting and just because most Garleans can't interact with it like other peoples doesn't mean they'd necessarily see it as unnatural, nor is there much to back that up in how they approach it. Why would they want to put magic in its "rightful place" when they have no reference point to base that on to begin with?

Several of the items you listed there were also averted or endured with magic as well as being caused by them. Bahamut would have been a whole lot worse without Louisoix's intervention and Alexander ultimately took itself off the talble. The events around the Lunar Transmitter and Dalamud were also instigated by the empire so it's kinda shakey to use those as examples of things the empire were trying to prevent. A lot of them were also outside the knowledge of most people in the setting. It's hard to justify doing a world conquest because of a thing that happened 5000 years outside of living memory and is largely only known to a handful of scholars so you can't really justify the empire on the grounds of stuff said empire as a whole (Emet notwithstanding) was unaware of.

The issues people tend to have with Garlemald stem more from the imperialism than anything else though and "magic bad" isn't really more of a justification for that than "primals bad". Emet-Selch used the historical grievances and conditions that the Garleans did have to turn them into a destructive force but I don't think you can handwave away empire quite so easily.

[Cleretic]

Their 'weird angle' is blatant contrarian trolling.

The Garleans are ultimately supremacist totalitarians, and any arguments they make are at the end of the day only to justify their pre-existing desire to be on the top, rather than in any way correct. Even before we learned Solus was an Ascian (which I do still think greatly cheapens the Garleans), they were very clearly wavering between old-fashioned Roman imperialism and straight-up fascism, so it's not at all surprising that the Empire's origin point was supremacist strongman politics.

But I think the most crucial, understated part of their story is actually Lakshmi. It shows that, for all the Garleans' strongman posturing and iron fist rule, it's not even succeeding at their pitch. Primals are still a problem, and they're a problem in their lands specifically and only because of the Garleans' oppression. Lakshmi shows, clear as day, that either the Garleans can't stop the disasters they're claiming to, or that they actively won't.

And of course, this is all without getting into the absolute disaster that is actual Garlean politics, because a violent, supremacist outlook is basically predestined to produce the worst possible leaders. Zenos isn't just a bad ruler, he's also the inevitable endpoint of the Garlean outlook: if all a society values is racial purity, cruelty and violence, then it's inevitably going to end up promoting someone whose only credits are being cruel, violent, and the right race.

[Enkidoh]

Not to mention that their very technology is essentially a stand-in for, and in fact uses the same source as, magic (aka aether) - hence why it's called magitek, as magitek runs on cereleum which is a fuel rich in aether. As others have said, just because of a quirk of biology Garleans couldn't use aether in their bodies to create magic doesn't mean they're magic-hating muggles, which you seem to be advocating. The Garlean military after all freely employed mages in their ranks (draftees from conquered lands such as Ala Mhigo) so if they were really so obessively anti-magic, they simply would have not done so.

They also merely repurposed a lot of Allagan relics in their technologies as well instead of inventing them (again thanks to Ascian meddling), which, as we know often manipulated aether and magic itself in many ways. Garlemald's Corvoian ancestors might have resented the tribes around them being able to use magic to bully them and drive them out of their homeland, but they didn't resent magic itself, if anything they longed for that power themself - why else were there Garlean projects like the Resonant Project to try and overcome that limitation?

And to say nothing of mere Garlean farmers going to extreme lengths to be able to draw on magical power, by seeking out voidsent to fuse with and make use of their chaotic magic.

[Iscah]

Corvoian

From one comment in Endwalker, the adjective given is "Corvosi".

[Enkidoh]

From one comment in Endwalker, the adjective given is "Corvosi".

Thanks for that clarification, I couldn't remember the correct term to use.

[Seraphor]

This is like saying the US were right to invade Iraq because using oil is bad for the environment and Iraq have too much of it.