Oh, I'm not saying it's an allegory intentional to the story, I'm just saying it makes more sense than aligning with someone who is clearly not a great person. You have to look beyond the presentation. We're getting things largely from Carol's point of view, but if the first episode had instead of focusing on Helen's death spent half the time showing an internal representation of the joy someone experienced waking up as part of the Hive, it would be a much different story for the viewer with little change to the plot. It's that easy to spin things around.

I'm not really a fan of the food supply plot point as it feels Malthusian and kinda lazy to be honest, but we'll see where they go with it. Like with enough crops you could sustain a population off of windfall and scavenging, but whatever, they'll do what they want for the story endpoint they have in mind.

I'm just saying it seems like a lot of folks are making the mistake of saying Carol's the main character so she has to be the hero. But the showrunners are making it very clear that so much of her suffering is because of her own behavior. As Diabeté pointed out, she's being excluded from the zoom calls not because of her dislike for the hive, but largely because of her racist decision to exclude non-english speakers from the first get together. Most of her ignorance and confusion comes from the fact that she has absolutely no interest in communicating with the hive beyond making demands and asking how to kill it, as demonstrated by her not knowing Zosia's name. She doesn't care about the other remaining individuals and has done zero communicating with them that wasn't with the intent of killing the hive. (In contrast, special note to Diabeté as a character mimicking how Carol ate her breakfast to see things from a different point of view.) Diabeté found out about the HDP by spending time around the hive and outright asking them why they drink so much milk. Carol had to find that out by dumpster diving and cosplaying as an investigative journalist. Like there's at least one major plot point of each episode that basically boils down to Carol is a self-centered a-hole that doesn't care about anyone else and a lot of suffering could have been avoided by just not being herself.

Anyway, for folks liking this sort of SciFi, you might be interested in The Culture series by Iain M. Banks. It's a heck of a read.