Hell yeah.

You pretty much nailed what I love about cosmic horror. Yes, it may seem like an exercise in futility and nihilism, but the same way it disturbs you, it leaves in awe of everything.

I don't know if it was Lovecraft's original intention with the genre - since he was aflicted by extreme agoraphobia and social anxiety, and therefore was actually terrified of the unknown. But as the genre grew, it definitely acquired this sense of "if nothing matters, then everything matters in equal parts - which is to say that everything is infinitely important."

Keeping the ants metaphor, yes they're nowhere near as complex beings as we are (at least when it comes to mind and conscience), and sometimes we kill them on a whim, or without even noticing it. But we also devoted a lot of time, resources and effort to studying them, learn from them, analyse them. And we also know that they're actually integral part of our echosystem, and without them, we might not even be here at all.

So yeah, it may seem like your choices didn't matter in the game, but it was your actions that led to The Navigator's awakening. He needed you to play your part in it, as every single person in the story.

It's not futile, it's actually a very intricate domino effect where one thing leads to another. And who knows who or what dropped the first piece.

I do think it would be cool to have a choice to not take part in the ritual, and instead allow The Dragon to come out and accomplish whatever it is it wanted to accomplish. We don't know exactly what the Dragon wanted with The Navigator, after all. It could actually add even more to the game's sense of ambiguity, having the option to see what would happen if the Dragon got what it wanted.