Quarian Depiction in ME3

I was watching a YouTube video (How Mass Effect Wastes the Geth by pikminwolf, they have some great mass effect video essays that everyone should check out) and one of their points really stuck out to me in terms of the geth/quarian conflict.

It’s stated that during the geth war on Rannoch, the geth brought the Quarian population down to less than 1% of its original size. This obviously paints the geth in a very negative light seeing as they nearly caused the extinction of the Quarian race, but we can see their side once legion explains that the Quarians attacked first. Still, it’s very hard to believe that a race acting in pure self defense would need to wipe out OVER 99% of a population. It’s simply impossible to do that without also murdering countless children, elderly, and other innocent civilians. This, to me, clearly sets up the moral gray area which makes the conflict so interesting- the quarians objectively attacked first, yet they are also the ones who objectively face the worse consequences of the war (near extinction with no homeworld), making both groups flawed but ultimately sympathetic.

In ME3, however, the geth memories we see explicitly point out that the geth avoided violence when possible and it was the quarians who refused a peaceful solution. It makes players view the geth as the absolute victims and the quarians as absolute instigators who deserved their fate, which in my opinion a) makes it less interesting and b) just doesn’t really make sense considering how many innocent quarians had to die for their population to get so low.

There’s also the possibility that the geth memories we are shown are false / tampered with to paint the geth in a better light, which would be interesting but there’s really no proof of that.

So what do you all think? I personally had never really thought about it this way but as someone who loves both the quarians and the geth, it makes more sense to view the conflict as one group attacking first, and the other attacking back much harder, which is a more complex moral question than the more black and white “quarians attracted first and got what was coming to them” mindset I feel that me3/some of the fandom has.