Waco is politically contentious with hot takes mostly falling along partisan lines. Everybody likes to believe they know the truth about what happened, that this truth is evident to everybody else, and that anybody who claims to subscribe to a different narrative knows they're wrong about it but sticks with their version anyway for tribal political reasons.

I don't know what the law enforcement on the ground at Waco during those days truly believed, but I believe it is plausible they thought themselves in a violent confrontation with a cult that would rather die than surrender, and given that framing it is at least plausible they believed it would end in a Johnstown style murder-suicide pact if another ending wasn't forced quickly.

Maybe it wasn't really that sort of cult but they believed it was and acted on that belief. Maybe they were pretty sure the kids would be all unharmed but decided to go in anyway because they were bored or angry or psychopathic or something, and all their talk about saving the kids was just cynical excuse making. I don't know the truth for certain and I don't think you do either, but I believe it is at least plausible that law enforcement at Waco had good intentions and nevertheless failed to deliver a good outcome. If you're not willing to even consider the implications of that possibility, then I'm afraid you're lost to the politics of it.

While we can never know the motivations of the people who were burned alive as part of their rescue, we can in fact know the motivations of the feds because it was all pretty well documented. They were concerned that the branch dividians had illegal weapons. They never once mentioned any other motivation in any warrant application, memo, or otherwise. There was some frantic post hoc invented pearl clutching after the operation was bungled at a truely unprecedented level and excuses were needed to prevent embarrassment of powerful people, but none of that came up before the feds killed a bunch of children and needed to make a case why that was nessessary and part of a professional and skilled law enforcement operation.

There is a reason that event inspired generations of domestic terrorists, and it was not because the feds had the moral high ground and executed an efficient, well planned and researched operation.The overwhelming evidence is that Waco was about ATF agents getting to finally cosplay some of their deepest fan fictions and it got people killed. It was the moral equivalent of dropping a 1000 ton bomb on a crowded village in the middle east and being shocked when it produced a generation of fanatic jihadists. It was one of the stupidest and least professional things the feds have ever done, and that's an illustrious list.