That's a possibility, as well as my opinion that in the obvious LotR parallels that come to mind after reading EotW & tGH (Lan/Aragorn, Moiraine/Gandalf, Thom/Gandalf, Ogier/Ents, Ingtar/Boromir, Two Rivers/Shire, Baerlon/Bree, Myrdraal/Nazgul etc), Egwene is Gollum, not Padan Fain, as most people seem to think. In LotR, the One Ring is sort of a stand-in for power, or for the corruption of power and so on. Egwene is the one who is obsessed with accumulating and attaining power from day one, and in a clearly wrongful fashion. She never wants to put up with the strictures and discipline necessary or to acquire it holistically. She, at times, rationalizes her appetite as a hunger for knowledge, and others might cast her hunger for status and power as merely seeking the means to do good, but from the very beginning, she deliberately eschews both of those ends when they don't come with obvious attendant power.

If Egwene really wanted to help people, and protect and serve and whatnot, she would have embraced a vocation as assistant to the Wisdom. Instead, when she tells Rand that she is studying under Nynaeve, he laughs at the idea, and questions her plan, asserting that Nynaeve is going to be the Wisdom for decades to come, knowing that Egwene would never tolerate a subservient position without the certainty of imminent advancement. And Egwene never contradicts him, and confirms his assessment, with her plan to go abroad looking for a village to take the job. She'd rather leave her friends and family, and everything she knows, than spend her life as a healer with no political power. And when they meet Elyas, she asks to learn to talk to wolves, and when told she can't learn it, wants nothing to do with him from that point, not even wanting to share his campfire. More to the point, she is fixated on the path that will take her to Tar Valon as soon as possible, without any concern for Perrin's wishes or needs. This trait will recur in Verin's study, in Mother Guenna's house in Tear, and on their first day on Chaendar with the Wise Ones, where she has no patience with Moiraine's discussion of the Aiel prophecies and the Old Tongue and the significance of their terminology, and relationship to Rand and the Prophecies. This is all fascinating abstract knowledge, and not at all academic with the world in the state and times it is in. But there is no practical power in it for Egwene, so she keeps butting in, trying to divert the conversation to her own agenda. She spends the entire latter half of the series hoarding political capital, and plainly prioritizing her political position over anything else, including her friends' agendas and the very real good they are doing in the world. It's not that she dismisses the latter, she simply does not care, because it is meaningless to her, next to her accumulation of power. Every time she has the chance to step up and prove herself of use, she either ignores it or outright balks. These are very real patterns, and whatever Sanderson's shortcomings, I can't imagine that RJ overlooked leaving notes about her redemptive arc, or that Sanderson missed them entirely, so her arc seems to have been intended to be that of someone who was consumed with power to her own destruction.

The only other option I can see is that maybe RJ intended her death to be a redemptive sacrifice as the culmination of some self-realization near the end, when she grasps that all the political power she has been focused on gathering and keeping means nothing at the very end, with everything coming down to a huge battle, where influence and precedence is useless, and the world literally coming apart at the seams. When she recalls how many times she refused to give practical help, or argued against or interfered with, actual concrete accomplishments and tasks, she sees that here is something she can do, that by keeping and claiming the sa'angreal, and the position of prominence, for herself she has put herself in a position where not only is she able to help, she is the only one who can solve the problem, and accepts the cost as the price for her failure to rectify things sooner. I have no problem with the idea that Sanderson could not understand what RJ was getting at, so he wrote her death as he did.