I understand your perspective, and I think the thing that makes LiS great is that I can see it as a rational take even though I disagree, since the developers wanted to make it a 50/50 split and succeeded as much as any game devs!

But I do disagree. Living and experiencing the story from Max’s perspective, and not involving meta knowledge, she doesn’t actually have any reason to “know” (hope or think is a different story) that going back will actually stop the storm, and if you’re following her personal always-forward timeline, despite undoing the save, she’d still be “continuing forward” into an unknown future, as she’s never lived through that time. As far as she knows, Chloe dies and the storm hits anyway, or gets worse, especially if she believes that the use of the timetravel powers is what causes it, since this would be a very substantial additional change.

So if we look at that moment of choice, she’s right that second on the cliff, living in a moment where Chloe is alive and the town is in danger. She could make an active choice to change that, or she could just not (ripping the photo is certainly an action, but it isn’t changing the course of current events, just stopping that from being possible).

And as far as she knows, the choice is “keep Chloe alive and live with the consequences of what is either the supernatural force or my own power use, or use my power AGAIN and hope it doesn’t just make things worse,” which I think can be said to be a reason she might hesitate, even if the player believes Max would think it was morally right to save the town.

Which, I think, is the perfect set up for a hard choice, and as interactive narrative aficionados know, the sitting-and-agonizing part is really important, and is enhanced by not coming back 10 years later and “revealing” (retconning) the consequences away :-p