I run a lot of shades of grey. I have an unbelievably ancient vampire from a "first-ones" type race that has fashioned a whole xenophobic empire driven by blood as cost for any infractions - but they have a large, safe society, only the guilty give blood and rarely to the death, it's collected humanely, and the they have a lawful but otherwise free society that he actively promotes and does his best to lead. Is he the worst evil? He (well, it) doesn't see himself as evil, nor do the forest gnomes protected by were-leopard elite that any can aspire to join.
We have an ancient and failing Imperium that has genocided the dwarves in order to steal their mines of the literal Bones of the Earth (the land is the dead body of a deity), and created the drow to take their place. Oh, and also created halflings as a servitor race, and even mucked with the human nobles to make them better (where v. humans come from). They rewrote histories, pushed the elves to reservations because their memories were too long to gaslight, and commited various atrocities when they were growing and at their peak. But that was long ago and the current Empress is an 11 year old child, continuing her late father's trend of roads, food, justice, and education for her people. Is she evil, because she leads an Imperium has been in the past? On the other hand, when her "uncle" (father's cousin) made noises that she was squandering the Imperium's resources on exploration, she had him exiled before he could appear before the Council of Nobles to make a case for him to be put in as a legally Regent.
We get to one of the PC's uncle. He's rabidly racist against the elves, tried to kill the PC's father (a Duke) when the father took up with an elven woman, captured the baby and had his ears reshaped, raising him as a human and to also hate elves and lead raids against the very elven reserve his mother came from. He's pretty bad. But he's not a big-bad, he's just a middling-evil self-absorbed out-for-himself racist a-hole. We're talking ancient vampires, how could be be the worst?