It's a tough one, mate.
My personal view is it needed to be done. The 2015 AFC that we hosted here highlighted that. We had big dawgs come from all over Asia to watch their teams (think royalty, sheikhs, millionaires etc) - they came to the SFS and saw the unbelievably shitty and outdated facilities that we had and compared it to their home countries. To them, it really was like a stadium from 1970 that had not been touched. Which is almost true - SFS was built in the 80s. ANZ was no different. Yes, it had slightly better facilities, better boxes etc - but does not compare to some of the stadiums in Europe and even in the Americas.
Then factor in the money the Asian cup drew into the economy. $81 million directly from the tournament itself. Then there are the long term effects - young kinds seeing the Socceroos win it on home soil saw a 20% increase in the amount of grassroots registrations. Then tie this in with what happened when Japan and Korea co-hosted the WC... a ~7-8 billion dollar investment, and drew in over 30 billion in revenue. When you add the numbers up, I feel it adds more to the WHY the NSW government went down that alley.
My point is this - if we want to be able to be a draw card for other countries to play games here, we need world class stadiums. A simple upgrade was not going to cut it. There is a huge onus on world class stadiums, which has moved from being a "drawcard" to host events, to almost a necessity (think Qatar WC bid, Japan and how far they've come since they hosted the WC in terms of Soccer on the world stage). Overall, what killed this conversation is the long drawn out process turning this into a shitfight.
Also, as a fan of many sports - I personally hate our facilities here. It's part of the reason I went from going to 20+ games per year, to not 1 in the last 2-3 years. I'm all for change if it's going to generate hype, and hopefully, a WC on our soil in my lifetime.