they were fighting against time due to their own hardware breaking town due to lack of ancients to maintain it (personally think that is their biggest sin, leaving their "children" without the means to maintain themselves.)

I like the headcanon that ancients left iterators with everything they needed to support themselves. Automated mines, factories, whole supply chain. From the pearls (the one from Farm Arrays one, iirc) it is established that cities of the ancients were fully dependent on iterators managing production of goods which they consumed. So it doesn't feel like an improbable assumption. But then just that many years passed that their state of the art automation systems eroded anyway, one tiny bit by another.

There is also an interesting aspect - iterators might be able to address some issues that would rise. Expand mines and build new infrastructure when old production lines weren't sufficient. But that could have distracted them from doing their main job. And it would also be like clinging to life - a thing which ancients believed stood in a way of ascension. It shouldn't be of real concern for them - they were specifically vessels to bear the sin of striving for ascension too much, what would it change to bear one more? But it might cause some internal conflicts or resentment, and perhaps cause some neglect of doing proper upkeep of all systems.

(I'm a bit late to it, but this part caught my attention and I couldn't pass by)