Her “death”, at least in my view, was less the cause of the flood and more the last crack in the dam before everything fell apart. Not sure if that makes sense. The factors that led to the fall of OW were already present. Ana was the counterweight to all the bs.
Really, it's hard to find anyone among the founding members of Overwatch who would've been fully qualified to lead the team without eventually running into disaster. Reyes always preferred to work behind the scenes; Reinhardt is the last person who'd ever do paperwork; Torbjorn's an engineer, not a manager; Dr. Liao was never a soldier nor someone who'd fit in that kind of position; and while Ana was probably the most competent manager among them, the baggage of her personal life plus her complete fear of accountability would've been proved to be a crushing burden on the team. Frankly, it's kind of impressive that despite being overpromoted, Jack still managed to keep the Golden Age going for over 20 years.
As for who could've actually been the best choice, Sojourn stands out as being a top-notch coordinator and Overwatch's best tactician, but canonically she got really damn jaded by having to deal with the constant politicking that hastened Overwatch's downfall. Really, I'd say Winston has a good shot at becoming the team's best leader ever lore-wise; someone at the reins who hasn't had the hope and bright-eyed optimism crushed out of them beforehand is exactly what the team needs to succeed and thrive post-Recall.
Ana has always struck me as a person who is terrified of failure. She holds herself to such an incredibly high standard because she needs to, but whenever she falls short she can never own up to it; rather, she runs from both the problem and the solution alike and starts anew. Her and Sam's marriage deteriorated? She runs to Switzerland with her daughter. Critically injured on a mission? She fakes her death and runs off to become a vigilante in Cairo. Her daughter feels resentful and estranged because she was cruelly denied her life's dream? She runs from actually sitting down and working it through, and dismisses any attempts with meaningless apologies and placative words like "I'm trying". The worst part is that Ana is completely self-aware of this flaw, but despite being one of the world of Overwatch's greatest heroes she's too much of a coward to actually do more than just look in the mirror and lament how miserable her own choices have made her and her loved ones.
Really, I feel the worst for Sam and Pharah. I can relate to the bitterness she feels towards a parent whose self-image is too fragile to accept accountability for their failures and how devastating that can be for her own perception of herself; I feel it every day for myself. As for Sam, there's a quote from M*A*S*H* that I think of when I imagine how him and Ana went downhill: "If you love someone you've got nothing but trouble, so you can either stop loving them, or you can love them even more." Sam, I've always imagined, is someone who tried to make up for every time Ana refused to share in their life together, every time she failed to meet the emotional needs of the people who depended on her for them, and every time she ran from a problem rather than work with him to fix it (not to mention that there are voicelines ingame that hint at Ana cheating on him with Reinhardt) by loving her more and more and more until one day something just... snapped. A proper relationship is like building a bridge: You both start at opposite ends, you meet in the middle, and you walk across it together, but there came a day where he realized her end of the bridge would never be built, so he turned around and walked away. Loving her even more stopped being worth the trouble, so he stopped loving her and that's where the real tragedy of it all lies, in my opinion, because it not only left two broken people to walk a path alone that they should've carried each other along, but it doomed their daughter to the same fate, all because Ana will never actually find the courage to say "I failed, and now I'm going to fix it."
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