I'll have to say a big 'Meh' to this - LTT didn't understand a lot of things, one of which was A) how to defeat the Dark One and B) how to nullify the effect the Dark One had on the Pattern. I tend to think how the Pattern (and balefire) works are something that only the Creator (ie: Robert Jordan) ultimately knew.

I think this may be a situation similar to the mass-suicide of the Amayar wherein RJ was surprised more readers weren't affected by this in a more visceral way, but I think he may have underestimated exactly how many readers would quickly become apologists for whatever insane horror Rand unleashed because he is the "Hero"/main protagonist.

I think this is ultimately one of those sci-Fi author-lead questions like "Where is your humanity!?" and someone responds, "In the Fiction section. We go to Sci-Fi/fantasy to indulge our feelings of superiority, our need for clear heroes to root for and our need for violent spectacle."

From the WoT FAQ regarding balefire:
"John Walter Biles explains: The Pattern unravels permanently because in a war of mass destruction with balefire, you can yank threads out of the Pattern faster than they can be replaced. Yeah, they can EVENTUALLY be reborn, but unless the total population of all of creation is static, then they won't be reborn instantly. More importantly, it screws up causality. That's why the Pattern can unravel; it's not that you run out of threads, it is that if you nuke an entire city, every consequence of every action by everyone in the entire city is suddenly undone back to point X. Given the amount of balefire nuking a city takes, you can make quite a mess. Do enough damage to the Pattern faster than it can repair itself, and it still comes apart."

The reason I post that explanation is that it isn't the who, what, when and where that seems to matter, it is the effect of burning out large populations with balefire that causing the Pattern to unravel. So the magnitude of what Rand did really wasn't lessened because he might have killed Graendal - it was worse because he was messing with the laws of time and space.