The 'idea instilled' and other ways to blame your kid for its fate worse than death
This is one of those lines you really shouldn't take at face value.
Firstly, the Hollow Knight's corruption might speak to a flaw with the HK specifically - but it is significant that the one other animate vessel we find is also corrupted. All others are dead: at least one is implied dead by suicide. The game doesn't exactly support the reading that the vessels are the emotionless tools that the task of indefinite containment calls for!
The second point: suppose that the vessel plan could have worked, that the Knight (perhaps the Knight alone) really can indefinitely contain the Infection. Even so, the White Lady would have no way of determining this. She thinks the Knight can do it, but she also thought the HK could. "Its supposed strength was ill-judged" - by whom? Why would she guess better a second time, with a vessel she met a minute ago?
Far from the wise guide the White Lady presents herself as, her dialogue makes much more sense if she's understood as every bit the emotionally inflexible visionary her husband is. She kills millions of her own offspring and unsuccesfully tries to Omelas Child the (seemingly) sole survivor. Confronted with the fact that her child-tool didn't meet her expectations, she concludes some external idea corrupted it. When she meets another survivor, she immediately decides it'll make for a great replacement part in her plan, and assures it that there's no way things will go wrong this time.
The kids call this 'cope'.
There is no 'idea instilled'. There is no reason to assume there ever was. The vessel that made it to the top first would always have failed, as did the one that followed five seconds behind. Throwing bodies at the Infection was always going to be a stopgap measure.
In the end, and to her credit, I do think the White Lady can be made to realize this. Returning to her with the Void Heart gives the following dialogue:
That pulsing emptiness... Truly, it has been transformed by the revelations it found.
Does it... feel anything? Triumph? Or hate? If it does, I cannot sense it.
The fate of our Kingdom, our Hallownest... that future belongs to you now.
If, at this point, you still follow her instructions to usurp the vessel, you end up with the Sealed Siblings ending - the worst possible outcome. The 'good' endings require the Knight to go beyond what the White Lady considers possible. The future belongs to you now, indeed.
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