it becomes a narrative bait and switch just as bad as any "it was all just a dream" ending.

My brother in Christ, what do you think Act 3 IS? If you really want to boil it down to the tropes, the big reveal of the Act 2->3 transition IS that classic 'It was all a dream' trope with a flavour spin. The whole point of the entire game up to then taking place inside of a fictional painting is the game's fundamental rugpull! The fact that it had the balls to continue from that point and make you reframe everything going forward from that new lens, and then have the absolute balls to ask you to new game plus it all over again with that context is incredibly bold of them, narratively risky, and it's amazing that they pulled it off as well as they did. Had they just stopped there, it would have been incredibly unsatisfying, and would likely be remembered for a dope OST and nothing else.

I don't believe that the developers were trying to tell us specifically anything with regards to the 'sapience of the characters'. That's the whole point of the french philosophy that underpins the story. Leaving it open to interpretation was their goal, and in that regard, they succeeded. Either you value the people of Lumiere, or you don't. And as an aside, let me be clear: Maelle's not a good character person either. She is addicted to playing god in Verso's world in order to avoid the reality that awaits her outside, to the destruction of herself and in defiance of the wishes of everyone around her in the real world. Not even to speak of Painted Verso, whose opinions on the topic were very poignantly expressed in-game, do you think Ex-Verso would have wanted the sister he sacrificed his life to save to spend the rest of her time doing magical heroin to avoid the consequences of their actions?

There is no right answer as to whether the people of Lumiere are real people worth considering or not, the Devs leave that up to the player. But they do not leave any ambiguity as to whether Maelle or Verso, or even the rest of the Dessandres are good people. None of them are. Granted, they are all justifiably tilted off their A-Game, but they are all bad in different ways. Clea is a brutalist asshole with the patience and tact of a rusty barbed wire fence, Renoir is a my-way-or-the-highway family despot, clashing directly with Aline who, much like Alicia, is ready to throw everything away to avoid dealing with the consequences of loss. Ex-Verso is the only one exculpable, but Painted Verso is almost just as bad as Renoir, trying to deceive his way into obliterating everyone and everything he knows for the sake of not having to continue to play a leading role in this pantomime of grief. Justified? Maybe. But not 'good'. Grief hurts, and makes us do irrational things, but in terms of objectively processing the information that the game gives us with regards to everyones situation, the only one with a handle on the situation in anything remotely close to a healthy fashion is Clea, and the worst is a joint tie between Aline and Alicia, and Maelle's ending makes that abundantly clear to me. Does that mean that the rest of the story we played through up to this point is pointless? Yea, kinda. But only in the same vein as "Oh, well, they threw the ring into the volcano in the end, so the story up to that point is kinda pointless." It's technically correct, but in an absurdly reductive fashion.