I just finished playing the remaster of this game! I was also pretty confused by it and can see why it got a lot of criticism.

Her defense is that players end up feeling similar to the character in a meta kind of way. Players probably didn't agree with the way the story was going, but pressed on anyways because they want a conclusion to the story, and that conclusion ends up being terribly unsatisfying. You could have stopped playing, just as the character could have stopped pressing on, but you didn't. Now both you and the character have to deal with the crappy ending.

It's definitely a unique way to tell a story, but I'm not sure it's a story that needed to be told. "All of that stuff you did was pointless". Yeah, I know! I knew that at the start!

She also brings up the "Abby Spectrum" which is more of an interesting idea. Trying to avoid spoilers, Abby is presented to the player at the start of the game doing something absolutely evil. She's essentially the big bad villain. Later on you get her tragic backstory and see her do lots of nice things. The idea is basically, everyone hates her at the start, but how do you feel about her at the end? Are her backstory and good deeds enough to change your opinion of her? Where do you fall on the "Abby Spectrum"?

Maybe the story would have been better if it focused more on this question instead of purposefully setting out to be unsatisfying as a meta way to explain why endless violence, fighting, and revenge is bad. Though I suppose there are a lot of people who might actually need that to be explained.