Are all the veiled statutes we see across Sol dissenters?
The ones in the Pale Heart are, I'm assuming, recent Dissenters that appeared while the Witness was preparing the Final Shape, while others all over Sol would have to be older. This line from the campaign:
We are the shame our Witness could not bear to reckon with, and so the first knife cut us out. Exiled, until we are deemed worthy. Imprisoned until we could be reintegrated into the final shape.
... is something I always interpreted as the Witness punishing the dissenters, putting them into these statues, and scattering them around, then leaving them with sort of instructions for what to do to prove themselves "worthy" in order to be reintegrated into the whole. So the purpose of all those others across Sol had was to basically be prisoners forced to influence and trick anyone who encountered them so they could one day prove themselves to the Witness. That would explain all those statues we've seen that appeared to be trying to lead us astray, gifting us the orb in Shadowkeep, influencing the Black Garden in Garden of Salvation, helping us with stasis in Beyond Light, and so on.
The one I'm most interested in is the big one in the Deep Stone Crypt because it would be one of the oldest, if not the oldest - pre-Collapse. It's the biggest one out of all ever discovered, and the only one that isn't entirely motionless - its veil moves and it looks like it's breathing. It's really quite different from all the others and it also behaved fairly differently. It was actively hostile when people tried to move it, for example. But to me, its purpose remains more or less the same; it was enacting the Witness' will and plans, probably in an effort to one day be deemed worthy of returning to the greater whole. The only thing left to understand is how it got there, given that it arrived to Sol well ahead of the Witness and the Black Fleet. Clovis specified that his analysis showed that it got to Europa at least 20 years before it was found, and he also tries to explain its arrival:
ARRIVAL EVENT: omnibus analysis of spallation products in the ice suggest recent x-ray bombardment, characteristic of the decay of a Majorana-massive Light sterile neutrino. These neutrinos are associated with the Lambda field and the expansion of the early universe.
I ... don't know what that means, but Clovis also says that it was "an entity beyond our dimension" so. It's also worth noting that Clovis absolutely had zero clue about the true nature of the statue, Darkness, or anything beyond that. It's similarly inconclusive how the K1 anomaly arrived to the Moon, and when, given that it was also an artifact of the Witness (which also led Clovis to come to Europa in the first place).
We can probably just chalk it up to the story around this not being finalised (heh) at the time of Beyond Light, so that statue is a little odd, but overall it fits within what was established later. You can always just figure that we simply don't know all the details about the Dissenters, or their individual/group beliefs and behaviours, as well as what some of them may have been willing to do in order to be accepted back into the Witness. There really isn't any contradiction here story-wise. "Exiled until we are deemed worthy" really does say more or less everything we need to know about them, and it also informs the change in their behaviour during the Final Shape - until then, they simply wouldn't have known that it was possible that someone could be capable of stopping the Witness, but during the campaign, they realised that this is a real option and decided to help.
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