Yup, that's the one. Christ that's a lot of potential stuff to lose. You are correct that seeing it as the "evil" path may not be the appropriate way of seeing it. I don't see it even as an alternative path their though. I'd hope that Larian, or any studio, wouldn't expend resources on a fairly large "Are you happy now" misdirect. In Morrowind you could kill anyone and the game would straight up tell you when you killed someone important and botched the main quest, that's as close to a "you dun fucked up" I'm willing to accept.
The issue is that even seeing it as not an evil path it's still, in my opinion, an extremely specific kind of playthrough. It also requires a degree of meta to actually get to that side since you either get Sazza and skip a whole bunch of stuff or you skip the grove and run on down to the Goblin camp. Its just not a choice that's really presented as a genuine option currently.
Taking a meta view, the infiltrate the Cult approach fails immediately after the Grove is burned down so while it is a mindset to go with it backfires relatively quickly. The newer cinematic of the three and almost getting enslaved also warns you off the approach due to significant risk. Even if you want to infiltrate then you don't actually have to help the cult since you can just walk around and tadpole power your way through. Though that gets into the whole issue of the tadpole itself being a giant screaming "Do Not Use" alarm. The path to power which in my mind is the tadpole path is still extremely unpersuasive to me. There just isn't a strong pull to get a person to look at the cult and think "Ya, this might be a good idea". Currently its more "A hot Drow wants you to kill some folks for her and while she'll likely try to kill you at some point its worth the risk". While there might be more down the line with this path its kick off isn't great.
It may be that at release where and how you wake after escaping the Nautiloid will be completely or somewhat different and will better present the Cult option. I'm somewhat doubtful as I think they'd at least want to parse how an altered start would affect people's choices. The other consideration is with how close to release they are now and what the priorities are, if they haven't already changed or improved this path. I do hope they improve this potential alternate choice, however they haven't presented anything significant to indicate they are since this criticism began.
