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There's a case to be made for dueling what is essentially a post-scarcity socialist Federation against the embodiment of capitalism-as-cult.
Conversely, the Borg are in a way aspirational-- growing and assimilating knowledge and improvements seems a bit higher of a goal, but their presentation comes off ham-fisted.
I feel like there's a missing explanation of why "assimilating the diversity" of a civilization needs to be a total stripmine rather than taking a few (potentially willing) representatives and regularly coming back in case anything new evolved, like binge-watching a civilization every few years. The stripmining aspect seems necessary to make them recognizabily villianous-- the enemy of sacred individuality rather than just data hoarders whose homelabs turned into giant cubes.
It does feel like Latinum is very much a MacGuffin for undermining a huge amount of "we have virtually infinite free energy and can replicate anything we need" worldbuilding; they needed a way to make 24th century capitalism seem remotely plausible.
The Borg became a metaphor for colonialism, I think, with assimilation being an "improvement" for it's victims.
I never though of it that way. You are completely right.
I almost feel like you’re describing the Trill or the Tokra regarding willing assimilation.
I've always assumed that the Borg were once a truly egalitarian faction. One that seeks out other points of view in order to invite them into a collective where every voice has a share in the overall direction of the whole.
I could see such a collective evolving into the current Star Trek Borg if things like fascism take root. A rabid xenophobia of thought that seeks to destroy any 'wrong-think' within the hive mind.
It would explain a lot of the problems that the Borg seem to have. Why they never seem to learn from their mistakes despite their adaptability, why they all share one mind despite their quest for distinctiveness, why they have a single load-bearing queen despite their usual priority of hyper redundancy in all things.