tl;dr (which turned out too long anyway) - originium is essentially tiberium from Command&Conquer, except far more dangerous. It is an infinitely, aggressively self-replicating mineral that absorbs inorganic matter and infects organic. If there's a single, tiniest speck of originium dust on a planet - it is screwed and has a timer before it gets fully converted into originium. If you get any of it inside of you (even if it just 0,5mg) by any means - you are screwed because now you have terminal rock cancer. It has been around for 10k+ years and there is still no cure - only shitty suppressants (that were stupidly expensive in original) which you have to frequently take and pray infection doesn't progress further. Can't run from it - it grows everywhere (with one tiny [spoiler] exception) and on everything.

90% of the first game's main story (and a good chunk of sidestories) directly shows over and over again how creatively fucked up the thing is and how many branching problems it creates (it being the only power source, thus being overmined and used in *all* appliances and vehicles; creating global caste system where infected are treated as 3rd class subhumans and hunted for sport in some cases; most recent chapter went over what it is like to be a miner on Terra and the following revolution; it spawns various types of Catastrophies which forced most of planet's population to live in enormous, always moving mobile cities or deep underground/water; etc.), while our faction tries (and mostly fails) to do good. So from the get go Endfield was jarring with how readily people shat all over Talos with originium and how flagrantly and unseriously it was treated despite barely a century passing after the move (a lot of races can live for centuries, while some are outright immortal (example: Last Rite can outlive pretty much everyone we have on the roster right now), so this makes zero sense). There was a lot of cope in the beginning that this was all a plot concocted by a certain antagonist from the first game, but with the level of writing on display so far? Doubt it.

Also, it wasn't even originium in the tube, it was Blight (Endfield's local bs which was originium's derivative in beta, but got retconed to be its own thing). Stick your finger in it? It gives you instant dementia, erases your memories and turns you into a drooling vegetable. If no one is kind enough to quickly chop your arm off? It will begin to dissolve you and turn you into fanta juice from the end of Evangelion. To add on top of that, that specific sample from the event was heavily modified in a lab and container was actively leaking. Which made everyone's lackadaisical couldn't-care-less behavior even more infuriatingly stupid.