Yeah, on one level I agree with you. I see Tenet as similar to The Dark Knight Rises (or many recent superhero films in which the villains are evil versions of environmentalists, black nationalists, etc.) in that respect. The villain is depicted as cartoonishly evil and as entirely unsympathetic for the reasons you describe - he is an arms dealer who has decided that he will kill everyone in exchange for power and luxury before he dies, at which point he will take everyone with him. But I see this as a way of the film stabilising the moral dilemmas that it produces, so as to defuse any potentially subversive political messaging. In my opinion, the basic dynamics that structure the film are expressive of reactionary anxieties about the possibility of historical change and the way in which new modes of living and social organisation end up erasing those of the past.

Thus, while the motivations of the primary antagonist are those that we are mostly shown as an audience, it is clear that another set of tensions (those between the interests of the present and the future) lie behind and ultimately structure his actions without him even knowing it. The antagonist admits this quite openly during the film and describes them explicitly as, (I'm paraphrasing) 'the future was fucked by climate change and so people decided that they needed to change the past in order to create a new future, even if that meant destroying the past as it was'. The antagonist is the puppet of this attempt, rather than its author. But Nolan makes sure that this puppet is as repellant as possible so as to stabilise the moral aspects of the film and facilitate our identification with its protagonists - i.e. the people who, according to what we know about the future of the film's world, are working to preserve the present order and thus to ensure that the catastrophe that the current order produces happens to someone else rather than to them. This is why I ultimately think that the film is an expression of capitalist realism in its most brutal sense (even if its most visible antagonist is still also a capitalist). Its explicit argument is that the present order must be preserved against all possible threats of change, even if we know that it will bring about a catastrophe so terrible that future generations would risk annihilating everything in the present in order to save themselves. Ultimately, I guess I see this as reflective of similar anxieties as the Dark Knight Rises (in which a relatively localised and disorganised threat in the form of an Occupy analogue were the villains), but for an era in which the organised left is beginning to reappear as a wider threat to the capitalist 'end of history'. The way that I read it, the film's primary message is, 'things could, but definitely should not be changed. You are justified in harming future generations because their demand that the present be different is as much them destroying your world as you literally making theirs unliveable. And this is true, even if their demands are based upon a reactive desire to stop the damage you are doing to their world'.