From what I understood of the show, Vault-Tech’s idea was if they nuke the world they get rid of all competition. If they are the ones dropping the bombs themselves, they can prepare ahead of time for survival and come out ready to dominate a completely “reset” market. It’s a sort of zero sum game; if you assume that another company will have the same idea, and you assume that they will also drop bombs after themselves preparing for the fallout and recovery, then you would want to be the first to prepare and drop the bombs. The show could have explored all of the logical fallacies with this, but they didn’t so it’s unsatisfactory in the greater theme.

I completely agree that it’s a very superficial and lazy critique of capitalism, bordering on offensive. It is slop, the only thing intentional about it is appealing to a broad audience and making profit.