I agree it's not direct evidence, but it seems easier to believe some guy named Jesus was crucified by the romans than that he was made up for some indiscernible reason. If you read the text as a historical depiction of a real (but not necessarily divine) figure, you can read a jewish eschatological preacher who predicted an imminent apocalypse. We can explain the formation of the bible entirely historically and note how the themes changed over the course of writing it to reflect a realization that an christian society had to organize when the apocalypse did not happen. This doesn't require taking the accounts of miracle as fact by any means, nor that the gospels were actually written by the apostles whose names adorn the text, etc. (In fact this can all be true if you're christian, though that may not be a popular sentiment, as faith without clear evidence is kind of central to the religion.)

Anyone who does want to press the question of the historicity of the existence of Jesus then needs to explain the motivations of the people who wrote the texts. That's a hard question to answer given that we don't know much about them or the contemporary christians. It seems easier to believe that the bible did originate in some concrete event surrounding the crucifixion of a jewish eschatological preacher causing trouble to the local romans than some inscrutable conspiracy to... what, accept suffering in this life but not the next? That seems like something that dovetails with state religion ala "opium of the masses"—genuinely soothing, but in so doing inherently works to maintain the status quo—not a place to start analyzing the motives of the authors as entirely fabricating the situation. And of course by the time it started gaining real momentum, the distinction between it and a popular political movement vanished rapidly. Why not see men taking advantage of a clear opportunity for social change to develop culture, much like they behave today in, say, business? Miracles themselves can be explained by psychosis, by intentional exaggeration, by unintended exaggeration, by some contemporary rhetorical flourish that might have been interpreted differently at the time, etc. I don't expect people to understand the faith and belief of others, but it shows a woeful lack of imagination, curiosity, and empathy to write off the billions of christians to have existed as irrational even if you can't take claims of divinity or afterlives or miracles themselves at face value in modern interpretation, especially compared to 2000 years ago.

To the contrary—most of our current institutions of rationality in the west were formed by people struggling with the very question of how to reconcile their christian worldviews with the empirical evidence of the world around them.

In my opinion, of course. I suspect many, if not the majority of, historians would agree that Jesus likely did exist and there was some event where he was crucified by the romans, and the people who witnessed this spread the news of such event.