I think we can all agree that Living Memory and this last part of the MSQ sucked, it's all just disagreement on in the Endless were actually "alive" or not. I would posit that they are not, but that the writing is all over the place wants two contradictory things to be true at once: That the Endless do have real thoughts and feelings and sentience, thus making them more or less alive even without a soul, or that the Endless are nothing more than the digitized memories of dead people stuck to run around in endless loops at the "happiest time of their life" forever in this digital purgatory that needs so much energy to run its threatening the life of everyone across the Source and all the remaining Shards.

The writers will treat them one way one moment and another the next, entirely based on what that scene wants us as the audience to feel about them. They could have leaned into one side or the other and maybe this would have worked. But they tried to have it both ways and instead get this confusing, jumbled mess of a zone and theme. Oh, we can't just shut down the terminals, that's not SAD enough, we must ERASE all the data on them (even though by the looks of it we just turned it off and nothing else.) The Endless have no sense of self preservation, which is part of what leads me to believe they are not "alive" in any sense, because we just flat out tell some of them "yeah we're shutting this place down," and they don't act to preserve their "life" at all, they're just like "okay Here's a sidequest to fulfill my dream of being a great retail worker even in the afterlife so I'll disappear."

Honestly I felt worse about metaphorically burning the Library of Alexandria by deleting it and their museums than I did about any of the "people" there. It's all a mess though, that's for sure.