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I am also certain that is the thought process, I just don't see how you can actually convince yourself of that. That's why I used the people jokingly giving alibis as a counterpoint. That seems like the same thought process, but processed by a sane mind.
In my experience, people have phenomenal powers of self-deception. In fact, it takes a great deal of effort to think about things critically. Even with that effort, I would say that just about everyone has at least one or two issues where they fool themselves pretty well.
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The default for a lot of people is very much anti-Litany of Tarski, and closer to all the corollaries of "faith can move mountains" (an actual idiom, reflecting a paradigm reinforced in all sorts of ways in our dominant culture: cf. also "don't jinx it" contra speculating about bad possibilities). Really believing a thing can make it true, and if the thing being true leads to good outcomes, then isn't it your moral duty to believe it?
It doesn't help that in a lot of contexts where the Random Civilian's beliefs are polled at all, a dynamic holds that with some squinting really looks a lot like faith-based miracles: the sick individual is healed by placebo, and the Ghost of Kyiv style stories translate into a general atmosphere of "Ukraine can do it" that percolates through social media back to the frontlines and results in Ukrainian soldiers being more willing to sacrifice themselves and believing that their fellow soldiers and adjacent units are likely to do likewise and hence actual Ukrainian battlefield success.
Even as I sympathize with that general line of argument, Ghost of Kyiv is a poor example to use for that argument. It had about as much relevance in the Ukrainian media sphere of the time as the Iranian AI-claim of shooting down a skyscraper-sized F-35 had in the Iranian sphere during the 12 day war. It existed, people cheered (or jeered), but it wasn't the reason people involved felt the way they did, as opposed to the many other things going on at the time.
The reason it makes a bad example is because the presentation presents as if it was the cause of the Ukrainian faith. The opening days of the Russian invasion weren't exactly lacking in verifiable, faith-building reasons for the Ukrainians to believe 'Ukraine can do it' when the 'it' at the time was 'meaningfully fight back.' The Ukrainians crushed the Hostomel Airport air assault, the Bayraktar TB2 drones hunted Russian air defenses, Ukrainian volunteers were hunting Russian armor with anti-tank weapons in the forests, Ukrainian farmers dragging mud-dragged Russian equipment, and of course the many shoot-downs that did happen away were all much more influential in the Ukrainian media-sphere. The Russian and a fair deal of the global expectation at the time was that Ukraine was days from collapsing, the Ukrainians disagreed, and nearly four years later one side's belief that meaningful resistance was possible was vindicated.
I fully agree that such media stories helped motivate Ukrainians to believe that resistance was not futile and that others had their back and would risk alongside them. But that social perspective was far more because of things like the mixing of molotovs in the streets of kyiv, something that a large part of the country's political and social centers had direct visibility of, than the Ghost of Kyiv propaganda. Ghost of Kyiv was never load-bearing on the Ukrainian willingness to fight on the ground, and it wasn't exactly long before the video game origin was recognized and circulating.
Ghost of Kyiv's cultural impact was more of a western obsession. First in the 'we want it to be true' sort of the pro-Ukraine camp, but over time in the 'Ukraine is lying liars and we can't believe anything they say' anti-Ukraine camp, where it regularly emerges as a reason to dismiss Ukrainian success (they claimed the Ghost of Kyiv, and it was fake!) and to believe pro-Russian framings.
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Look into Jonathan Haidt's "the elephant and the rider" model. Most people don't operate in a hyper-rational fashion, motivated reasoning is the norm.
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