There's certain kinds of antagonists that are easy to sympathize with and he's one of them. He's just a doomer antagonist, someone whose lost all hope after repeated failures. Dude doesn't need a beatdown, he needs a hug. Similarly, look at the Fraxidus in Wuthering Waves, who are accelerationist. Yeah, they do reckless and dangerous experiments and attack anyone who gets in the way of that but, as I recall, that is mostly driven by the acknowledgement that reality is breaking down and monsters/superhumans are appearing so might as well do experiments on themselves to figure out how to turn everyone into superhumans or fuse themselves with monsters to rush through to the inevitable and adapt to the new world.
yeah, an antagonist whose central conceit is that the world is, in fact, bad and they are just trying to deal with it in a practical way after losing hope tends to be pretty easy to understand.
I think it's worth pointing out that the logic behind saying that fantasy isekai are medieval in development and should have around the same understandings is the same basis for things like ancient aliens discussions. Different civilizations had different priorities, resources, and histories. There isn't a fixed order to how things develop and a big difference like having magic would easily throw off any expectations for that. So, you should never think that an isekai fantasy is medieval europe-like in development, as the things we see usually have them more advanced in some regards and less in others. It's just that they might have a similar aesthetic or class structure which, even if it could be affected by technology, its mostly a societal matter.
Also, didn't she have to explain the process to a researcher who was focused on trying to figure out how to make rain and only had a theory at the time on how it worked? That was last chapter. They know, NOW, but she was the one who told them. Until then, it was some country's closely guarded secret.
