I've possibly made this statement before either here or elsewhere.. doesn't matter.
Jared Diamond's book Guns Germs and Steel seems to attract a little bit of hate from some podcasters and the like, particularly historians. There's much to criticize in the book but I find it to be annoying how much they seem to miss that is "useful".
Primarily in that it explains what is obvious: The domination of European Empires in the last 200-500 years, without resorting to Skull-Caliper Race-Science nonsense; idiotic arguments from Culture, or weepy moralism about how bad colonists/settlers/etc. 'noble-savage-esque' (by our modern moral standards, and the standards at the time, the colonization of the western hemisphere was a horrific series of genocidal crimes... but jesus christ at least admit that the Aztecs were also fucked up... humans are just fucked up in general )
Rather than all of that Diamond says a lot of it comes down to geography, while some can simplify this to be "up-down v. side-side"-simplification of his idea that the shape and orientation of the continents played a role, I think it at least attempts to find an answer to "why didn't the Mayans or Aztecs use Llamas?... surely if you sheared the llamas you might be able to cross panama with them in Winter?" -that isn't something completely racist or a non-answer.
My point is basically that there's something to be said for how this is at the very least a useful starting point for constructing a ""big picture"".
though perhaps I'm just experiencing too much twitter discourse.
Apologies in advance if this is stupid.
So is it good or bad when the Aztecs pissed off their neighbors to such an extent that significant numbers of them backed Cortez's otherwise ill-equipped and undermanned expedition?
European exploitation was significantly worse that Aztec exploitation of other indigenous. Aztec policy was mostly to let their dependencies govern themselves if they paid tribute to Tenochitlan.
You should stop thinking of societies as "good or bad." That's colonizer logic that ends up getting used to justify "taming the savages." Colonizer logic is brain poison that we all have to work to expunge.
You completely missed OPs point. No one is justifying what happened with colonization or that European domination of the Americas was better or nicer or kinder than the empires the euros found in the Americas. OP is trying to understand why and how it happened. His point about significant numbers of Aztec subjects backing Cortez is important because we see this shit all the time in the history of empire. Would the US have been able to fuck with Chile or Brazil or Argentina or Afghanistan (80s) without the approval and help of large numbers of local elites who supported them?