OK let’s see if I can untangle this somewhat, so it appears I have somehow conflated the absence of identity with the absence of agency. “Absence of agency” in this regard would refer to something like I described below, some version of that fear of becoming a “leaf blowing in the wind” :
It seems what I am trying to get at when I refer to agency is the ability to act with intent and to implement intelligent action based on this intent.
So really your and @claudiu’s answer has clarified this already. Agency remains throughout, it is only the ‘self’ taking itself as the ‘agent’ which is eliminated. And so it seems one of my main objections was based on a misunderstanding…
And I have often wondered about this because in my PCEs it was always clear that there is still agency, as in I am not a zombie or a leaf blowing in the wind. There is very clearly the ability to act with intent and to implement intelligent action based on this intent. In some way I imagined that actual freedom must be more extreme than that haha.
Oh determinism is the perfect word for what I imagined would happen after self immolation, that there would no longer be agency and life would simply play out in a deterministic manner.