Cook was an explorer and worthy of respect. It’s not like it’s a casual jaunt to the other side of the world, it was an arduous task and a remarkable feat.
Unfortunately Cook’s arrival heralded that age’s colonialism, itself a mixed blessing.
It’s only now, with the wealth of the world’s history at our fingertips and an objective view of the past up to the present that lets us judge the effects of past events.
Avoiding flares, aberration etc makes an image objectively better. You might subjectively prefer either the objectively better or objectively worse image.