Although advocating to have less empathy generally isnt considered good there are ancient and modern schools of thought that explicitly says that empathy can be bad.

To understand the enemy is to some extent to start to love the enemy and that's bad because the enemy is bad. The idea is that you can only have empathy for certain people.

Worth also pointing out that there's also a more modern but uncommon idea that empathy towards someone or a group may weaken and shutter their own "truth" or identity stories but this is for the moment only heard in radical academia not on the street.

Generally there's also a large amount of people who don't know what "empathy" means with the ever present confusion of it with "sympathy", endorsement and alignment.

They are like us. If you could take a baby from the past and let it grow up in our time, you wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a baby born in modern times.

If you see value in travelling to other countries and appreciate experiencing the different human cultures there, you should also appreciate experiencing human cultures from the past.

They are separated from us not by distance but by time which makes it harder to experience their culture.

So much was lost that we can only get glimpses on how lives were back then. So anything that expands our knowledge on the variety of human beings experiences is worth it.