The discussion on whether we should have tanked or tried to compete is pretty meaningless anyway as there was no real choice in the matter. The new FO took over a last place roster and had no choice but to sell off before the 2022 deadline because of the upcoming cap problems for summer 2022.
It's easy to forget this now but the Habs had zero money available in summer 2022 until Price agreed to go on LTIR in mid August, and they used the money to eat Monahan and sign Dach. Last summer going into this year there was a tad more flexibility but at most we could have afforded to add maybe one generic Garland/Perron/Killorn/Compher type of forward and that's not enough to change anything. A bottom 5-7 finish was always locked in for 22-23 and 23-24, the roster was overloaded and capped out with bad veteran players and lost Danault, Price, Weber, Kotkaniemi, and had Gallagher and Petry both decline heavily. You can't just snap your fingers and make 30M in bad contracts disappear and instantly replace them with market-value star players.
I get that the rebuttal is just going to be "lol you can always blame the last guy" but the NHL has a hard salary cap and the Habs were completely capped out on crappy veterans who had little to no trade value. We got paid a 1st to take Monahan for 1x6.1, the price to dump Drouin, Hoffman, Armia, Petry, etc and then also go out and acquire enough core roster talent to get the team into the playoffs 2023 or 2024 would have been absolutely astronomical.
For the upcoming summer & 24-25 there's probably room for debate as there's finally more cap & roster flexibility, but the discussion of whether or not we "should" have tanked for 22-23 or 23-24 is pretty meaningless as there was no realistic path to anything remotely close to a playoff team.