idk, we Could look at the plot with La’an and alt!Kirk as the blatantly stated exploration of whom La’an would be without being part of a legacy that includes mass murder and genocide, horror and pain. We could examine her character to try and see where the trauma from the Noonien-Singh legacy meets and ends with the trauma of her past with the gorn, because they both exist her history but it’s not immediately clear where the line is. La’an without a legacy shadowing her was still La’an, but she was more open and forward and relished the chance to be somebody who doesn’t have to explain herself just because of her name, because of what somebody else did in her past, indicating that it’s not necessarily the death of loved ones that is closing her off to other people but rather more related to her name. 

We could take it as the exploration of Kirk as a character and how he relates to his brother and father in the prime universe in context with how he gave his life to make a universe where Sam lives still (among other things), showing that for all he has golden child syndrome in prime!universe that he truly and genuinely Loves his brother enough to die for him, just as La’an’s brother loved her enough to die for her. 

The plot with La’an and Kirk in the past, and the fact that La’an bonded with him so quickly and outright admitted to him that the reason for this was that he did not live in a timeline where he even knew her name, let alone judged her for it, says Oodles about her as a person and her relationship to her lineage in a very deft way that could not have been done with any of the characters we see every week. We Know Kirk’s a flirt, and at the time he was a flirt who was expecting to cease to exist in a few mere hours time, it’s really not surprising he took a chance with the beautiful and frustrating woman he’s found himself with. 

That La’an participated in that kiss, which wasn’t even a big old make out session, it was a reasonably chaste kiss for an on the lips thing, actually tells us things about her and her willingness to engage without the chains of a legacy. That she then went on to call him her friend Afterwards while in distress at losing him tells us that, yes, she thought of him as a friend from this and that losing him and what he gave her (freedom) has hurt her deeply. 

That she went home, checked the timeline was fixed, and that seeing him made her cry, the intermingling of her grief at losing Jim her friend and all that he offered her in his ignorance. The Prime!Jim Kirk cannot give her what this alternate version did, that he is gone, dead, doesn’t exist, and that she is grieving. And yet she now has to know him still, and speak to him, and talk to his identical mirror, as if she never knew what he did for her in a world that doesn’t exist and never will again. 

or we could just write it off as having no storytelling merit i guess.