It was definitely a heavy choice and not an entirely clean situation. I don't think the story was trying to tell us that these memory-people didn't matter. Even Erenville's mom wants to spend time with her son before inevitably shutting the system off despite her words on the matter. It certainly didn't stop Krile form bonding with the memories of her parents. And the way the music cuts out and everything turns gray, we were definitely meant to feel something here.

That said there also wasn't much of a choice. Living memory was frankly unsustainable and if there was another way to keep it running without such cost, Sphene would have done that. Sphene was harvesting souls because she saw this as a grim neccessity in order to keep living memory going, it would not makes ense for Sphene to go to these lengths if there 'was' an easy third option.

But it's also important to remember this is not the death of a people or a culture. The Alexandrians are alive and wll in Solution 9/Heritage Found. All we did was shut down their Mikoshi. A digital afterlife being powered by living souls. Their culture, their history, their people live on and are doing just fine.

So ultimately I don't have a big problem with how it went down. Sure I suppose they could have thrown in some more text of someone being like 'surely there must be another way' 'no actually there is not' but it wouldn't have really affected how it all played out.