Fascinating. Just yesterday I chanced upon a grimoire card which gave an overview of competing theories concerning the Traveler.
At the very end, a view (considered heretical) is shared that the Binary Star Cult believes the Traveler initiated the Collapse to protect itself from the Darkness, thereby enlisting all Life as a proxy army.
This agrees very well with your theory.
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Perhaps the Traveler is not Good or Bad, per se. Just ultimately self-interested. First it giveth, then it taketh away, as Queens of the Stone Age once said. It "blesses" when it gets the greatest advantage for itself and then "curses" when it's better served to do so. From the perspective of the Traveler, perhaps there are no heroes or villains. Just pawns to play.