Understanding perspectives is a useful skill. But it's not where having an educated opinion ends.
I understand the desire of US fossil fuel companies to do fracking. They're not stupid or comically evil. But they can be greedy, misguided, selfish and too focused on short term gains (if you want to be extra accustory, "within their lifetime"). If you then move over to how much astroturfing is involved in pushing through a viewpoint you may even call it evil. Though not comically, because everything here is still just following the forces and inventives of our economic system - profit at every non-monetary expense. If you want change, your solution needs to address systemic issues (not neccessarily abolishing capitalism, but focusing on different inventives and making other alternatives viable/profitable though taxes)
(I hope the point I picked is uncontroversial enough, but you can probably apply it to your least favorite policies of your least favorite flavor of political party, organization, movement or institution)
Say there's a comic book where fossil fuel co's worked to permanently ruin the groundwater and increase earthquakes in a region - bribing lawmakers and fucking over the people who lived there, gagging scientists, etc - all just for a resource that is literally burning the planet... So they can upgrade their megayacht/private jet... I'd find it hard to believe that others could allow it to happen.
"Following the incentives of our economic system", so your actions are indistinguishable or worse than those of a comic book villain, *is* comically evil. Literally. The fact that so much of our economic system defends this behavior says a lot.
"Comically evil" usually refers to a character that is evil for the sake of being evil, without external motivation. Like the stereotypical first D&D character some people make.
Such people are somewhere between rare and nonexitent. You could say the fossil fuel company executives are pretty high on the evil scale, but they are not evil for the sake of being evil. And I was careful calling them evil because HN is a politically diverse bunch and sometimes saying things diplomatically is the right choice over being technically or morally correct but getting downvoted into oblivion for invoking a certain kind of language.
If you need an example: I basically never say I'm trans or an anarchist in any top level comment to explain the origin of my perspective or my claim to knowing more context than others because these two words got me outright dismissed too much in the past.
Not-fracking gives an enormous leverage to the Saudis, who are textbook comic evil as well. A medieval theocracy slowly transforming itself into a modern authoritarian country, dissolving dissidents in acid on the way.
Or to another major producer, Putin's Russia stuck in the Stalinist imperial mindset.
There's a method for deconstructing an opinion to eliminate bias and examine it through as objective of a lens as possible. This generally helps ground a lot of irrationality. Their conclusion might not necessarily be correct, but as you said, if you understand the perspective you can structurally address it.
I understand the desire of US fossil fuel companies to do fracking. They're not stupid or comically evil. But they can be greedy, misguided, selfish and too focused on short term gains (if you want to be extra accustory, "within their lifetime"). If you then move over to how much astroturfing is involved in pushing through a viewpoint you may even call it evil. Though not comically, because everything here is still just following the forces and inventives of our economic system - profit at every non-monetary expense. If you want change, your solution needs to address systemic issues (not neccessarily abolishing capitalism, but focusing on different inventives and making other alternatives viable/profitable though taxes)
(I hope the point I picked is uncontroversial enough, but you can probably apply it to your least favorite policies of your least favorite flavor of political party, organization, movement or institution)