Maybe I've forgotten the Alexandria subplot as a self-defence mechanism, but I don't think there was ever any implication Alexandrian society as a whole was actually falling apart or at risk?
The people that are part of a society can be the factors that lead to it's downfall. If they cannot even function without their precious regulators, what hope do they have to continue to sustain their civilization without that safety net to fall back on?
Living Memory wasn't the main issue with Alexandria. It was a symptom of a larger issue which is their
over reliance on souls and the everkeep system. Living Memory was a massive drain on their resources but it came from regular citizens treating souls like
common currency. As such, having been raised in an environment where sudden death wasn't an issue, Alexandrians have no idea how to handle being told that they don't have protection from that anymore and what ensues are people having literal mental breakdowns in the streets because they are so scared that they might suddenly die. A person isn't productive when they're huddled up in the fetal position and shitting themselves out of fear. They don't know how to handle any sort of hardship because systems have been put in place the shield them from it. You saw yourself how people reacted to a funeral. A lot of them couldn't even handle that much. They can't even handle going through the grieving process. It's like a person and their smart phone. You take away their regulator and they're nothing without it. They don't know what to do, they don't know how to act, they don't know how to put on their bootstraps and keep going. They just breakdown completely. What good is a society when it's filled with people like that?
We're told ad nauseam that souls are dwindling, yet in all it's years of existence, no one has ever thought to find a better solution. Souls were never meant to act as an unlimited resource and it baffles me that none of their scientists or researchers had never thought about it or even worse, that they thought up to use souls to begin with. That's like building a skyscraper out of wood, you know that it'll fall apart eventually but you go ahead and build it anyway. It didn't help that Zoraal Ja basically took control of everything and set everyone who could've used their knowledge to create a better system into developing tools for war. We're told that the only ones not freaking out about everything are Turali, yet not a single Turali among them appears to tell people there are better ways. Let's just have a fake Sphere appear and roll everyone all the way back into self destructive old habits.
Even the thought of going outside everkeep terrifies them. Their environment outside is extremely dangerous. You have monsters and bolts of lightning that strike down frequently. Their reliance on souls helped them cope with this and they treated getting stuck by lightning as a small inconvenience they could just shrug off with a spare soul. Without one, just taking a walk is deadly for them and their hunters can't effectively combat these monsters or patrol the area without the threat of a sudden bolt of lightning killing them. Alexandrians themselves weren't even aware that their reserve of souls were running out. They don't tell them because it would've caused widespread panic, instead telling them that they were going towards war efforts.
And again, this is what is so fucking insane to me. Like you said, they have an abundance of electrope that is capable of being used in so many adaptive ways. A goddamn lizard mage can use it to create people who can fucking EAT FOOD and an entire other world just from memory. But you're telling me Alexandrians can't find a way to use it in more beneficial ways like creating dome shields for their settlements outside or using it for special suits for their hunters to protect them from stray lightning bolts or maybe even using it to combat the aforementioned lightning sickness? A civilization run by retards is doomed to fail.
