Exactly, is this game supposed to fill me with hope, confidence and power. To think that if I put my nose to the grind I can achieve whatever I want? Or make me feel depressed as heck?
In regards to engram's are just a memory trace, that's their meaning. But doesn't that make a person? Soulkiller makes a brain completely blank, it literally copied and pasted you. In reality of it, an engram is probably still a person. The only thing they're lacking is the hormones, slap them back into a body and they'll have that. What's worse than death about it is that you're robbed of your body. You wake up on the other side, and you may realise what happened to you. It's the forcible removal of a 'soul' that's the issue. In regards to the main religion shown in cyberpunk, the fact your soul is now a tangible item it goes against the teachings of Buddha.
Expanding on this, I feel that people need to remember that Johnny's point of view on Soulkiller is painted by his life-experiences as a War Veteran and personal bias. He's a very troubled man, you can see this all throughout his past - so his view on Soulkiller should be taken with a pinch of salt and not the complete picture. When you get hit by it through Alt in Mikoshi, you
literally do not even experience a thing any differently than you did experience things hours beforehand.
Alt even says that she's not really 'Alt' any more on this matter, but that is because she's an AI at that point in the game. She has no 'body', a floating entity within Cyberspace that is lacking emotion and passions and is essentially just protocols acting out a point in her life in defiance of Arasaka. This whole element is emphasized by how the Voodoo Boys require a pure, extracted memory from Johnny's Engram that Alt will recognize, because she will not recognize anything else—think of it as Game Coding in the C++ engine, certain things have to tick certain boxes in order to the code to operate properly, without hostility.
Yes, she is capable of developing further nuances and associated data within that AI of hers, but without a body, without the ability to accumulate human experience, emotion, and drive, she is not a 'Human' any more.
Johnny grows. Develops, within V - he experiences things, he shares the same neural pathways and body. He even states that for 50 years, he was locked in that moment of death, a prison, festering over the same memories and never actually able to do anything else - like a sensory deprived chamber. Before he ended up in V, he was cell-locked in that moment.
The game also questions at what point in life within the Cyberpunk universe do we lose our humanity? Think about that.
This is why I am of the opinion that the 'Going with Alt' ending is actually one of the worst ones. You're casting aside what makes a person a human, entirely.