I think it's more like a dream / being a kid. When you wake up or grow up and look back, it recasts that experience.

So if we die and there's nothing, then there was no intrinsically bad experience — there's just nothing, but if we die and there's something, that change, in absence of the body, would be so fundamentally different as to recast what came before, assuming we even remember. A lack of memory would be closer to the nothing relative to what occured before.

So in either case, the theodicy fails to be a serious question because it presupposes what it doesn't know. In reality, it's not a real question, it's emotional rhetoric that tugs at very material / pedestrian heart strings, and should be disregarded as lacking a serious foundation.