Free Will v. Predetermination

Netflix is pretty much tapped out so while we wait for the final season of Better Call Saul and season 2 of Russian Doll, we have switched over to HBO, and over the last few days I have watched the first two seasons of His Dark Materials, which is a pretty good action adventure across parallel Earths. Our protagonist, a young girl (14 or so, I’d guess), comes from a sort of steampunk Earth, but with witches and prophecies and mystical talismans and stuff, where each person is accompanied by a ‘daemon,’ their animal spirit, and most of them can talk and they’re kind of reflective of the individual, since most of the bad guys have snakes, lizards, spiders, but the super baddie, who is our protagonist’s mother, has some weird, long fanged, orange monkey.
She (Lyra, the protagonist) doesn’t even make it to our Earth until the beginning of season two, and a lot of the action takes place on another world between hers and ours, where the only survivors are children because all of the adults have been killed by ‘specters’ who look a whole lot like the Death Eaters from the Harry Potter books.
At any rate, one of the burning questions seems to be ‘would humanity be better off if Eve had never eaten the apple?’
It ended abruptly, there are apparently a couple more seasons to come, and I want to know how they resolve it.
So now I’ll go back to watching Devs, which in a way focuses on the same question, but without all the witches and specters and talking ferrets. The bad guy, head of a huge internet company, believes in a totally deterministic universe, i.e. everything proceeds from its cause and could happen no other way, the path of the universe is fixed and all of our actions are completely determined. He’s killed somebody, an employee who was about to spill the beans, and his girlfriend is determined to find the truth.
Free will vs. Predetermination. It’s also the theme of the Matrix, with the whole red pill/blue pill question.

I’m on the side of free will. Here’s how I see it. First there was nothing (maybe- or maybe the materials for universe building are as infinite and eternal as existence itself, and there was no beginning and will be no end), but anyway, then there was energy, then there was matter, then there were suns and planets and then there was life. After life, then there comes complex life, life which can react to it’s environment and it evolves and evolves (and this is taking place in billions of places, over and over again) until there is intelligent life, self-aware life, life which actually wants a certain outcome and is capable of bringing it about and at that point the whole game changes. I’m willing to accept that chickens and gazelles don’t have a highly developed sense of free will, but people do, and we can make the world be whatever we want to.