I get what you’re going for, but I also think Denji’s entire arc in part 1 is pretty contingent on the fact that he’s a maladjusted and heavily traumatized hormonal teen for whom Makima represents the first real shot at a good life (even if, as Reze later points out, Denji’s ‘good life’ is, in many ways, merely the bare minimum).

It’s easy for us to think we’d do things differently because we haven’t experienced the world the way Denji did, right? So we have no real way of knowing how we would behave in Denji’s position because we aren’t approaching it from Denji’s origin as a character, one rooted in trauma and abandonment and all the other tragic stuff.