I see the whole finale to the Pain fight as a big "Naruto is better than Sasuke" from the author. Here we see Naruto go through something similar to what Sasuke went through, with Naruto losing the village, probably a lot of people he cared about, Jiraiya, Kakashi, and as far as he knew, Hinata, (not that anyone cares about her) and yet he didn't become a revenge-obsessed punk like Sasuke and actually got past all of the negative shit he was going through.
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