Paragon and renegade were obvious stand ins for the two major sides of US politics, liberal democrat and liberal conservative, even being coded as red and blue for good measure.
Like with US capitalist “democracy”, your choices are aesthetic and the results will always be disappointing and shallow, because they change reality of the story and the ending very little. The sides of paragon and renegade end up just being two sides of the same shit sandwich.
And just like in liberal politics, wishing for anything better is treated as not an option.
Legion in Mass Effect 2: “We do not understand why anyone would choose individuality or non-consensus, it seems genuinely disturbing and frightening to us, the race of Microsoft Clippys who want to build a Dyson sphere to upload ourselves into so we can all be literally exactly the same in every way”
Mass Effect 3: “You can either genocide the Geth or turn them all into individuals, a thing that Legion implied would be the closest thing possible to Hell for them”