re: religion being evolutionarily advantageous. Totally. Though with your specific 3 points, I respectfully suggest you're missing the forest for the trees. The specific stories we tell through religion don't always matter as much as the aggregate power of enacting and conjuring them together. Sometimes strong-willed and stubborn groups are what was needed to thread a needle through an important time in history. Many of the specific stories that emerged through that stubbornness might be no more than vestigial features -- feature that have no direct purpose, but as products of some underlying third factor.

For example, the old testament version of christianity was perhaps the right thing for that time, and the new testament person of Jesus was perhaps the right iteration of Christianity for that time. These stories suited the human network of the time, which perhaps had very different network structure -- the lawless chaos of man and nature during old testament times (in which strict codes were needed to gel society), vs the rigid and dominant social stratification and class conflict/divides of New Testament times (in which Jesus' teachings helped knit together a fractured social network).

In case these things are of interest, there are some fields delving into this stuff: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276494993_Structure...