I wonder if it'd be impossible to make a sympathetic character (whether they're immediately or eventually so) out of someone who did something as plainly evil as immolate an entire village's worth of people.
I'm sure it'd take some serious elbow grease to pull that off, but I found attenuating his crime by recontextualizing it as "putting already dying people out of their misery in a hopeless situation where their deaths were already certain" to be a bit cheap in one regard. It absolutely gives his character depth, and he's all the better for it, and I think I prefer for that context to be established now instead of much later down the line.
Still, it did make me think of how feasible others think it is to write a plainly "evil" character that becomes a markedly better person without any obvious built-in hinges that establish him as "conflicted", "ignorant", "misunderstood", or anything else that preemptively undercuts the sense of evil he's initially characterized with.