Technology

In-universe the Jihad was generally seen as a necessity. No one was really against it politically, even if they skirted around or violated it in actuality.

Not really everyone, Ixans viewed it as obstacle, but didn't wanted to be nuked so they were making a lot of extra effort to comply even though they were actually violating it later during reign of Leto II. He allowed it because he needed the navigational computers which weren't even close to thinking machines btw.

Basically all PoV's were usually aristocracy, ubermench cultists or their cronies so they actually actively benefitted from the system put in place by the jihad, so no wonder they weren't quiestioning it. Also 10000 years is A LOT of time to burn the supertistion in people's minds, especially that author seemingly believed in some kind of biological species-wide memory that can be modified by social sciences.

Leto II said: “The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines. Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

Not convincing, especially not from the galactic slaver and genocider. As example you can see when Duncan Idaho go to the village in and is shocked by how miserable everything looks and is informed that basically entire empire looks like that. Sense of beauty my ass, about the same as Narco Rubio or Heinrich Himmler telling about the western civilization.

With all his prescience he saw humankind dying out unless he followed the Golden Path.

Funnily enough unless we believe in Omnius literally the entire Golden Path was created to deal with the problems of Golden Path.

That is a kind of tragedy, to be very nearly all-powerful and all-knowing, to know right from wrong, and to have tyranny be the only way forward.

Yes now you get it, it's a tragedy, though locked in place much earlier, during jihad. Also kwisatz haderach weren't all-knowing, some in-universe characters expressed that and even Paul and Leto constantly complain that the prescience locked them in one vision, we don't have literally any evidence that it was the only possible vision just the only one they saw, which they both admit. Also at least Paul had some possibilities to avoid and destroy that path but it would require him to die and he wasn't willing.

and to have tyranny be the only way forward.

So sad, much necessary, wow, i bet no one ever in history used this excuse.

I don’t for a second believe that Frank made the jihad as a reference to Samuel Butler because he thought it was a bad idea. If the book had wanted to communicate that it was a bad idea, it would have been presented as one at some point.

Again you might refer to the genre of tradegy, the point of them is that there is some condition set up that make for a inevitable tragedy and that condition is usually portrayed just as existing fact, especially that Frank consistently portray the setting not as ever-knowing narrator but from the point of view of characers. So as i mentioned above barely anyone even have information or mindset to even question the jihad and those who do support it.

On the other hand, we also see complete ahistorical absence of any kind of socialist thought and we know authow was a lib, so he might just liked primitivism, feudalism and objectification of the masses. Again, we constantly see the PoV of elites and humanity in entirety or even smaller portions of it shown as the grey amorphous mass with barely any agency which need to be directed by this or that ubermesch cult.