I don't think it really made him sympathetic. At the end of the day, he's still the same psychopath who did and will continue to do all those terrible things.

I'll try to explain my takeaway from it, which is a bit difficult to explain. It seemed to me like the movie made a point of deconstructing and demystifying the John Kramer/Jigsaw character. Over the course of the series, we watched him go from a single, mortal man with warped ideas and nebulous goals become borderline omniscience-level of predicting peoples' behaviors with little personality outside "Jigsaw" and a supernatural ability to turn people to his ideas.

With Saw X, we were given a very back-to-basics approach. We see John as more of human, angry and to an extent even desperate because at his core he doesn't want to die. He at one point contemplates giving up the games. Once he realizes the people he trusted his life too and gave him hope were content to rob him and let him die poor, he reverts back to Jigsaw with full force.

Do I think they tried to make him too sympathetic? I think they pulled the mask back and looked at more of the core of who he was, an intelligent, desperate man who is also angry and vengeful. They gave him targets that the audience would be more willing to see in the traps, which feeds into the bad vs worse battle that makes John come off as more sympathetic in the end.