And even worse, any warlike species that does this would also probably attempt to reverse engineer their tech and now you’ve got a warlike, aggressive species with stolen warp drives or whatever, ready to make war on the rest of the galaxy.

Some kind of self-defense would be a relatively minor addition to their mission and would be an important emergency necessity. Even out of date tech from their perspective could be centuries or millennia ahead of ours.

I wonder if this is the crux of the potential political debate/crisis among the aliens

I have no doubts the elites of earth would plunge the planet into nuclear Holocaust or at the very least WW3 in the face of any uplifting mission, the aliens may not necessarily be concerned with their own safety but rather the safety of the masses and ecosystems ruled by Earth elites

Without a sizable occupation force instilling some form of rudimentary order post-intervention, many humans would be left at the mercy of rump states and imperial remnants, labeled “alien collaborators” and massacred en masse

This would present a hell of a moral, logistical, and political challenge even for an advanced interstellar state, if they fuck this up Humanity and Earth could end up in an extremely mal-developed state for centuries or more

Oh im sure theyd be able to defend themselves just fine. The nukes arent a threat to them in this scenario its that our governments would be saying we will kill all the innocent human civilians if you fuck with us, and the Aliens dont want to see our government genocide us all. So the challenge for them would be how to dismantle the current ruling class without getting a ton of us regular humans killed in the process.