Actually if you read through the main translation of this text, Zosimos at his time seems to advocate for the same kind of stoic outlook you find in GLM, as well as reliance on self knowledge.
There’s been a lot of arguments about these old texts, but one of the emerging consensuses is that Zosimos was giving an account, unintentionally, of what at the time was an indication of a split within the schools of individuals who were practicing these techniques of tincturing at the time. Some were completely reliant upon the knowledge received from their non human daemonic counterparts, while Zosimos was advocating that these groups mentioned in the Synkellos fragment were missing the point. He points to those in that rival school as being caught in a trap, The discussion between Zosimos and Theosebeia echoes many of the modern day recognitions of investigators of what we know call “the phenomenon”. It is as if he is telling a story of something similar to the modern case of “ETs” giving technology to humans in our modern aircraft/space industry, where the technology and information passed on is adulterated or changed so as to leave the users dependent on the givers of this science, or at least second best to the tech they keep for themselves. It’s like he’s saying to these other alchemists, “hey, all these spirits only gave you half the information you really needed”. His writings contain an account of the origins of the art, true enough, but they also tell a story of a time when at least some humans realized by had had the wool pulled over there eyes by the entities that they were working with, and they were recognizing a need to develop a version of their science free from the problems of the partial revelation they had received.
So theres a warning present in the story that anyone going down that path take appropriate steps in self development so as to “don’t get fooled again”. It’s really interesting to me that Zosimos recognized this problem so long ago, writing as he was in the third or fourth century, and in a way he seems to be advocating a variant of the scientific method hundreds of years before it would become popular.