It really baffles me how these types manage to read this stuff so badly. The galactic holocaust at the end of Fire isn't an accident, it's the whole plan of the Powers from the start. There's a fungus growing in the Top of the Beyond that might threaten them and their cure is to cauterize an entire slice of the galaxy, a plan which comes to fruition as intended. The final transmission implies that maybe some Powers got burned too, which might or might not have been the plan (the Blight was found in the Low Transcend after all) but the Beyond being burned was never optional, it was the plan.

The Blight is a big threat but it's not even the first such threat in the galaxy; it doesn't threaten the entire galaxy, not even the entire Beyond; heck, the only reason the extermination fleet travelled all the way to the Bottom was the pursuit of the entities working to enact its destruction. It can easily be argued that the cure was worse than the disease. Ravna outright thinks that at the end, it's right there in the text.

I don't even know why I'm arguing this here. These types just make my blood boil with how badly they misread (not misinterpret) works that I really like. Ugh.