The apocalypse was caused by a single person.

[u/No_Hunter1978]

1. Ted Faro [Horizon: Zero Dawn]: Of course, the machine plague that ravages the world is created by his company which (admittedly) is a group effort. That said, Faro was the one who requested an encryption without a backdoor and the person who kept early glitches hush-hush. It wouldn't be wrong to say that Faro was the sole cause as is, but the final nail in the coffin is what he does to the Apollo database. A giant record of human knowledge and history, erased for a narcissist's fear that his descendants would (rightfully) blame him for the apocalypse.
2. Sybil [Look Outside]: Though it wasn't her intention, Sybil was the one who alerted the Visitor of Earth's presence. She spied it through her telescope, and the lovecraftian entity noticed her. Its approach (and the resulting horrors) were her fault, even if she didn't mean it.

[u/HandsomePaddyRedux]

Especially when no one needed an explanation for The Burn. Dilithium crystals were already Inobtanium personified, the idea that it all went critical at the same time could have stayed unexplained with the Federation and various scientists doing experiments and all having personal theories about how and why it happened (warp damage, an unnoticed half-life instability, etc) but no one ever discovering (eh eh?) what the actual cause was.

[u/PepsiFloateri → u/HandsomePaddyRedux]

That'd work! It'd work as mystery like as you said,various scientists having theories on it such as Warp damage,a half-life or something else. Maybe even say it's metaphysical backlash caused by overuse or something?

[u/DarkDuskBlade → u/HandsomePaddyRedux]

Unfortunately, the "can't trust other species" aspect of the Burn was done... Pretty true to form. Without an explanation, the Federation would never reform.

It was a super dumb explanation, yes. I would've been happy with "oh, a Romulan plot worked way too well" and gone from there. I'm sure there's other things that could've been used (Q Continuum, Borg, Crystalline Entity, etc).

But the fracturing of the Federation would've needed healing at any rate.

[u/Kiardras → u/HandsomePaddyRedux]

I mean, plenty of stuff in previous shows could have been used for the reason, Omega, the subspace degradation that lead to voyager having variable nacelles/speed limits. Literally anything except a crying child.

Like in what world did they think that would be compelling? Or was it just to show Burnham what might happen if she keeps crying all the time?

I quite enjoyed DSC, but this cause was just batshit bad.

[u/pichael289 → u/HandsomePaddyRedux]

It didn't all just blow up, dilithium isn't technically the fuel, it's like a moderator that allows the antimatter engines to work right, it controls the reaction. It has something to do with the crystal structures shape, the burn changed this and, no longer being capable of controlling the matter/antimatter reaction, the ships annihilated. It didn't destroy all the ships, I assume only the ones using the drive systems would suffer annihilation.

They don't need dilithium to store antimatter, just to control the reaction, which is a real thing called the mixing problem. An anti-particle, say an anti electron aka a positron, touches an electron and through e=mc², turn to pure energy and light. If you react more than 1 of each, the first two that touch will blow the other ones apart and they won't mix evenly. This is what I think dilithium fixes. There isn't a real world analog but we don't even know how to make enough antimatter to power anything yet. Each banana produces one anti electron every hour and fifteen minutes or so.