In this case, I think the framing story can be easily ignored, if you just encounter it for the first time. Diana is with friends in spot familiar to her, she tells a story, they go on to new adventures.
And when I was talking about it as a Golden Age callback, I wasn't really thinking about the mechanics of how Diana ended up in a strange place. But in structure and in its sensibilities, the story is very close to the one in Sensation Comics #11.
That's a benevolent interpretation of what Orlando intended. But I'm not sure what ended up on the page has that effect.
Empress Hippolyta was created to test if Queen Hippolyta made a moral choice in choosing to give birth to Diana. Here we have two options: either Empress Hippolyta was created power-mad so she would reject motherhood, or the rejection of motherhood caused her to go power-mad. I find both options deeply distasteful.
The comic is caught in and recreates the same structure that you start to describe, where embracing motherhood is viewed as weakness (or uselessness) and not embracing motherhood is viewed as morally bad. The story on the page rejects the first thesis, but does nothing to reject the second thesis, and thus ends up reinforcing it.
What was needed was to reject both of the theses: motherhood is not weakness, and choosing to become a mother does not make you better or worse as a person.
Instead we have evil Empress Hippolyta who did a symbolic abortion by throwing the lump of clay into the sea, and her possible return to grace is tied to seeing the value of motherhood. The more I think about this, the worse it smells.