tl;dr - a superhero does nothing, very loudly.

Various spoilers.

Yeah, it's pretty silly. His backstory was probably near or at Epic level

I think pretty much all the character's backgrounds were a poor choice on their part. You don't need a shred of backstory upfront if the writing is up to snuff, and having theirs be so high-level kinda makes everything happening pretty low stakes - the intro cinematic with the spelljammer vs dragonriders is basically a level 20 action sequence, and then you're slogging through mud and goblins hearing about how cool everyone else used to be, having just seen how cool the stuff you don't get to do is.

Plus Elminster could genuinely solve all of it in about three hours, so he shouldn't have even been there to say: ::: spoiler spoiler "So I hear you're an unstable antimagical nuclear weapon now Gale?". ::: Then teleport away without doing anything about it.

But eh, the story and stakes are all over the place. ::: spoiler spoiler It isn't even actually mind flayers! It's just mid-level clerics of the three gods who job harder than Skeletor, with a plan so intensely stupid - fucking around with Illithid - that it can only function via the power of a saturday morning cartoon villain's mcguffin. :::

It's... like the Battle Angel Alita movie. It likes the source material too much, so it crams in too many elements from much later and weakens itself in the process. Or perhaps the poison of escalation. ::: spoiler spoiler It isn't just hints of the mind flayer space empire, it's a netherese superweapon, no wait, it's also the Dead Three! The city you'll reach in thirty hours will be destroyed - and the entire world hangs in the balance! Only your level 12 characters can save the universe! ::: ::: spoiler spoiler

:::

Yeah, the differing use-cases for the various dashes just seems like an anachronism that's already basically faded away. Like the use of double-spaces, which is just an old typewriter thing... or QWERTY itself, but that's a pain to overcome.