You make some good points, and I try to follow the path of a bodhisattva for this reason.

However I will say a few things that might be worth considering.

You say "you can't resort to high, transcendent maxims to make our problems seem small, we have to tackle and overcome them".

Firstly - you're telling someone that they "can't" do something, when you have no idea whether they are actually valid in doing what they're doing. You're making a lot of assumptions about other people's states of mind and motivations for things.

Secondly - you're assuming that all external problems CAN be "overcome". Many issues that cause pain and confusion (war, climate change, animal cruelty, societal injustice) cannot be overcome by any one individual. Yes we all have a responsibility to do what we can, but we can't do it all by ourselves. Which brings me to:

Thirdly - you are thinking in the future. You are thinking from the perspective of "if we can change something about the present, in the future we can be happy". But you will never be happy in the future. You can only EVER be happy in the present. And you don't know if you have one hour left to live, one day, one week, one year, or eighty years.

Can you really blame people for choosing to be happy in the present? I don't. And I choose to be happy in the present. And yes I do think nonduality can help one to feel this. It certainly helped me.

I wrote an article "Feeling Inner Peace While the World Burns" on this topic, about how it's possible to help the world and help others WHILE letting go of the achievement of some future goal as the metric for allowing yourself to just BE in the present and experience the present moment fully (which is the only place happiness and peace can be found).

I do not believe that nonduality is "for" anything. Nondual consciousness is not a "tool". It IS. Everything. And I believe experiencing this does lead to strength which can be harnessed in the service of compassion, but to reduce such an experience to "building armour FOR something" is to create a boundary around an experience that has no boundaries.