IDW shown them to be frauds though James Roberts ignored them and went into an unknown pre-history and left it ambiguous whether the guiding hand were the real deal or a gestalt of outliers.
A few things...
IDW had three separate founder groups and it all got a bit wahoozy.
You had the Guiding Hand, who was Primus and his fellow gods.
Then the Knights of Cybertron.
And then the Thirteen.
The problem is that the KoC and Thirteen both exist in the same role, narratively, as the mortal founders of civilization after the Guiding Hand vanishes. So the KoC set the foundations for Cybertronian civilization, vanish, the planet reverts to barbarism, and then the Thirteen set the foundations for civilization again and this time it sticks, even after they all vanish.
While this can be seen as true to life (consider the fall of Rome at the start of the Medieval period) it creates a messy narrative and can read as unnecessary repetition of themes.
It would be one thing if IDW pulled a nu-BSG and tied this all in to the cycle of time, but they didn't and the KoC never got the exploitation they needed to flesh them out as their own thing. Instead they come off as a dry run for the Thirteen.
To the Thirteen themselves, IDW never denies that they existed in their continuity. They very clearly do. Instead IDW- Barber mostly as Roberts didn't start addressing this stuff directly until the end of the LL run- takes an Euhemerist approach. Where mortals and mortal events got mythologized into being divine or semi-divine through the passage of time.
It's not a bad take honestly, and I think Euhemerism as a concept works very well in a fictional setting (it even has its uses in trying to analyze myth in the contexts of history) but there's one flaw in how IDW chose to go about this...
Their timeline is super condensed when you consider Cybertronian lifespans.
Nova Prime, the first Prime post-Thirteen, is talked about as belonging to the realm of myth and legend... but he was also around when many characters in the present were still alive. Rewind even has a recording of one of his most famous speeches!
It's kind of hard to tell a story where the deeds of mortals are elevated to those of the gods through the passage of time when you still have people who saw the deeds of mortals first hand kicking around.
Most Euhemerist takes in fiction will either focus on the events as they happened with an epilogue showing how the story evolved and got mythologized by the end, or they'll focus on the present or future as characters discover the truth about whatever myth is central to the story.
IDW wanted to do both, and could have done both, but their own timeline makes it an awkward fit.
I had that, it's not a particularly good story. It's even below the Aligned novels in terms of quality IMO, and those weren't that great either. Stilted, overly dramatic, more of a retelling of a ponderous narrative than a true narrative itself.
And I get why. I get the feeling the intent was to kind of mirror a Biblical style of storytelling. Where there's less of a focus on dialogue and character growth and more dictation of Very Important Events. But it doesn't make for the most engaging experience.
