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Notes -
On the other hand, the benefits to the other groups might be outsized in proportion to the conditions they'd have found themselves in otherwise.
Being more direct, if you were the descendant of an extremely primitive tribe living on an isolated island where previously the only technology was sharpened sticks/rocks, fire, and MAYBE mud huts, and a colonial power arrived on the island, murdered half of your village, enslaved the other half for one hundred years, eventually released them from slavery and built a 'proper' society with modern technology for you to live in...
Well how does it balance out? If they had never arrived you, as a descendant, would be living in the same primitive conditions as before. Now you've got modern conveniences and a developed economy and you, personally, were never enslaved in the process.
So the benefit conferred on YOU, personally, is like a 100x increase in the standard of living than what you would have likely experienced otherwise, in exchange for a few generations of ancestors suffering greatly. So from the perspective of you, as an individual, do you inherit both the benefits of an advanced civilization AND the penalties of a history of oppression? How does that balance out in terms of what you're 'owed' in the present?
Thinking more on this it's clear that evaluating how things 'balance out' has a utilitarian presumption behind it, whereas I think the most plausible case for treating historical grievances with importance takes a more traditional view of specific 'crimes' commited which demand redress (greivances based on systemic inequalities where there's no obvious unjust act are a more recent innovation). So, as would be the case with any crime, you demand redress for the specific wrongs done and ignore the question of whether you'd be better or worse off in the counterfactual. Breaking into someone's house is still breaking into someone's house even if you leave a bag of money in their living room.
The most straightforward cases of this in history are the demanding of an official apology, the return of titles, legal rights, or land. The discourse of monetary reparations already veers too far into the murky waters of utilitarian calculations to be workable in my opinion.
Hence why I think there is a valid case to be made for agreeing to some specific number that will suffice to settle the issue once and for all.
Something that is more than a mere symbolic amount but also acknowledges that the outcome wasn't solely a harm or detriment in the long run.
But these are the sort of discussions that would need to take place in the process. Because returning you to the status quo ante would be to tear down all the trappings of advanced society from your island and leaving you behind with your village and sharpened rocks and sticks and fire.
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