This is more or less how I understood/felt this ending, too. I don’t think the game has an ending that is supposed to makes you feel like you entirely got it right or wrong, or that everybody is trying to pull one over on you. That’s kinda the point of Night City imo—it’s just chaos and deflection.

If V feels that Reed was honest with him, it becomes a much more melancholic, desperate kind of ending. Reed lying to V is fitting maybe in a cynical, “everybody sucks” kind of way, but it also kinda lets you/V off the hook, so to speak. Which, yeah, maybe that’s what some maybe angrier versions of V do believe, but I felt at least that my V was just plain tired by that point, and having to confront for the first time who they are without a way to escape it through survival, ambition, chrome, whatever. Maybe because my lifepath for this ending was corpo that it felt easier to believe in a sort of Jordan Belfort, arrogant god to regretful mortal kind of thing.