That last point about a landing attempt is particularly important. If the crew had continued to struggle with the aircraft and made the decision to land anyway, one of the first steps would have been to slow down and extend the flaps. We all now know what would have happened next. MCAS doesn’t work with flaps extended, so the malfunction would have gone away, and the landing should have been uneventful.
This really illustrates a lot of what is wrong with second guessing the pilots, and which (respectfully) reads to me as a desperate attempt to pin more blame on the pilots for a mechanical error.
The pilots had a situation where the plane was pitching its nose down for unknown reasons at arbitrary times.
Based on that information alone, would it have been a safe decision to land the plane without resolving the problem?