If everything is due to prior events, and that negates meaningful choice (meaningful free will), it negates meaningful everything (including morality, responsibility, power structures, anything controlling anything be it automated for not etc). All that is left are very bad descriptors, not meaning, nothing meaningful.
So, if I doubt free will, you seem to argue, then meaning itself goes out as well as in the old expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water.”
Well, meaning itself clearly does not go away entirely when you discard free will, or else you wouldn’t be understanding this sentence, which has a meaning. So, that’s a self-defeating argument.
To the extent that people behave nonrandomly and rationally, determinism isn’t the enemy. Indeed, it’s what makes logicall and rational and predictable decisions possible. Nondeterminism is just another word for chaos.
I maintain that the original problem with free will is at the definitional stage. What IS free will? What does it mean to have it? Please define it for us in a way that preserves what free willists really want: moral agency and the ability to feel superior to those whose actions frighten or dismay us.