Perhaps it’s like war films, in the sense that it’s very difficult to not glamorize the subject, no matter how gritty the treatment. The worse it gets the better it looks.
And on the other hand even if you tell the story of someone/something reprobable, it is their story, and stories are “virus” for our empathic minds - so we end up understanding and siding with the wrong ideas / actions when they are explored (because to explore them by focusing om them turns them into the protagonist of the story).
It seems quite essential to any narrative medium.
In other words, it isn't essential at all. Spielberg could have made a movie that represented only the helplessness, misery, and horror and left it at that.