civilians would have surrendered. I'm sorry to disagree with the die hard "fight to the last man/woman/child" people here. Perhaps remaining military would have fought to the last, but civilians outnumber military in the society. The entire planet would not be toxic. Instead of being moved to non-toxic areas, they were slaughtered by the geth.
To keep going on this point...
In human history, it's essentially impossible to find any examples of an entire society that fought and lost a war and was completely destroyed for its pains. Pretty much every single time, people surrender rather than choose Götterdämmerung.
An example: the classical city of Qarthadast. Its empire fought several wars against the Roman Republic, and in the last one, the Romans besieged and assaulted the city itself. The final battle was full of gruesome urban warfare, as Roman legionaries slaughtered combatants and noncombatants in the streets, moved house-to-house, and even used makeshift bridges to go over the rooftops. When the Romans chose to memorialize the siege of Qarthadast in later years, many of them claimed that the city's inhabitants had been massacred and that the city itself was razed.
But of course that wasn't true. As the fighting in Qarthadast dragged on into a second day, religious representatives managed to surrender the bulk of the population into Roman hands. Tens of thousands of people marched off into slavery rather than face the flames. Only a few holdouts were left, and it was these who were massacred (although even some of them tried to surrender). Even the city was not totally razed: the site remained inhabited for centuries.
Or, for a more modern example, look at Paraguay. In the War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s, Paraguay faced off alone against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and it was catastrophically defeated. Before the war, Paraguay had a population of slightly less than half a million people. But the Paraguayan dictatorship stayed in the fight until an incredible sixty percent of the population had been killed. Only about 150,000 individuals were still alive in Paraguay at the end of the war, almost all of whom were women and children. Some have estimated that up to ninety percent of the adult male population of the country died in the war. In terms of percentages of the overall population, it was the most destructive war in modern history. And, in fact, many - if not most - of those deaths were not actually due to fighting. This was before the adoption of rudimentary antiseptic procedures, and predated most efforts at sanitation. Most casualties were due to disease and infection, not combat deaths.
It's telling that there's no recorded instance of an entire people fighting to the death. It's incredibly telling that an event in which a "mere" sixty percent of a country's population died is unparalleled in the annals of modern history. What happened to Paraguay was not only far less of a disaster than we are positing for the quarians, it was still, despite its inhuman magnitude, an outlier in human wars. When societies see ten or fifteen percent of the population die in war, as did the Soviet Union and China in the 1930s and 1940s, it's treated as a nearly apocalyptic event.
So if the quarians fought such that 99% of the population was killed, and none of these quarians surrendered or tried to do so, that would be an event essentially without historical parallel. You could certainly explain it, and I don't mean to suggest that it is inexplicable without resorting to a claim that geth killed surrendering and noncombatant quarians outright, but there is absolutely nothing in human history or human experience that could allow you to do so.
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