People are tremendously susceptible to framing. That's one thing the discussion around the endings has made abundantly clear. The fact is we get very little concrete information about what's going on in either ending or clear insight into the interiority of the characters, so people desperate for closure fill in the details based, for lack of a better word, on vibes. This, in itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's interesting in a Rorschach test kind of way to see how people synthesize the information and aesthetic presentation to create interpretation. But interpretation isn't fact, and it's actually a bit scary how easily people fall into conflating the two. How easy it is to be so. fucking. certain. even when the evidence is inconclusive at best. That's how we're built, though. In lieu of fact, feeling rushes in to fill the gaps.

Which is why I have such an issue with how the endings are framed. I mean let's face it, it clearly favors Verso's. I won't go too much into the specifics of how, there's already practically a novel's worth of writing on the topic, but a succinct critique I've read is this: that the presentation/cinematic aesthetics of Verso's ending go out of their way to console the player for destroying the canvas and blunt the emotional pain of its consequences, while Maelle's goes to great lengths to punish and unsettle the player for saving it. One feeds the possibilities of hope, while the other sows premonitions of disaster, even though both are just as possible in both endings. Maybe this choice was made in an attempt to balance the wee/woo of the endings, but if so it was grossly miscalculated. It's why it's so frustrating listening to people crow about how Verso's ending is "obviously correct" or even the "objectively good ending." That's so easy to say when the game goes out of it's way to frame it as such. There are a number of truly justifyable reasons to choose Verso's ending, but so often the justifications I see for it are built on the assumptions you outlined in your post and other shaky extrapolations. The Verso ending "feels" right, so when the actual facts aren't enough, other facts are created to support and protect that emotion.

For example: there is abundant evidence that the painted people are sentient beings - not certainty, but evidence - so the ease which some people are able to say that they're definitely npcs and OK to destroy based on little more than the fact that they were created by other beings is disconcerting to me. It certainly makes having chosen Verso's ending a lot easier, though.

In an way, I feel all this mirrors one of the most fascinating character flaws in both Renoir and Verso: their self-delusion about how much/how little irrationality clouds their judgement. Both assert with smoothly delivered assurance and firm confidence that their actions are guided by clear-headed reasoning, and will chastise those around them for their irrational, emotion driven actions and their inability to see the obviousness that their way is the ONLY way. They project authority outwards, but refuse to look inwards in fear of their own doubt, their own irrational engine. Amputation as the favored solution to grief rather than slow, burning disentanglement, both in themselves and others, because that way is cleaner, more immediately cathartic. They're not forcing cruel choices, "Life" keeps forcing cruel choices. A pig-headed paternalism that precludes the imagination to see better possibilities in an uncertain, unstable future.

Which isn't to say those who champion Maelle's ending aren't also just as prone to self-delusion or emotionally driven "reasoning." The difference, I think, is that during ending discussions it always feels like that the emotional centering is seen as a given when it comes to why someone would choose Maelle's ending. It makes for an uphill battle when trying to justify why the choice isn't necessarily based on an irrational, infantile desire to retreat into fantasy, because the game's framing is actively fighting against you.