Creative Director
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Because of the name of the Adventure Path and its individual adventures, as well as the cover treatment, I felt it was no spoiler to confirm in the Player's Guide what the whole is about. A Player's Guide is supposed to prepare the players for the game and to help them make characters appropriate for the campaign. If the player's guide didn't do this and treated the Whispering Tyrant as the main threat, we'd have a lot of frustrated (rightfully so) players annoyed at the bait and switch of being told they're building characters to fight undead and a lich when the Adventure Path goes very soon into a very different direction.
The Whispering Tyrant and Encarthan Alliance ARE super important, but the story is that Trerazer's attack comes as a surprise after centuries of him taking his time and letting the region become complacent. The fact that Kyonin had started taking steps to build an alliance for a different imminent threat is part of what forces Treerazer to strike earlier than he expected, and gives the elves, Kyonin, and the PCs backup to deal with an unexpected threat that comes from an unexpected source.
If you really want to control your players' information about the game they'll be playing, then you perhaps should curate your own Player's Guide, but keep in mind that stories that do incorporate red herrings or plot twists run a VERY strong risk of alienating your players and eroding their trust.
James is 100% correct. The one unforgivable, cardinal sin an AP can do is promising a specific type of campaign and not delivering it. The AP is really about the war with Treerazer. That war is the premise and what the overwhelming majority of the AP is about (even when it sends you somewhere else, you're doing it to try to help the war effort). The exception is book 1, chapter 1.
The work the PCs do with the alliance is a threat to Treerazer's plans and it's what prompts things to start happening. It's also relevant later.
It can feel weird at first that the "demon war AP" starts off talking about an unrelated undead threat, but it does tie together. If your players are confused by it, just be honest with them. It's nice to be surprised by what is going on, but it's important to also have correct expectations about what kind of campaign you're signing up for.
If you look at the advice for running APs where players feel it did a bait and switch, how to deal with that comes up a lot. Second Darkness is notorious for it: the guide and the premise of book 1 are all about trying to get ahead in the criminal underworld of Riddleport. In book 3 the tone/setting/plot shift so drastically that it's effectively a different AP, and we had players balk at that repeatedly, going "it makes no sense for my character to want to do any of this." (Not to mention any backstory and such specific to Riddleport was now useless since you never go back there.)
Thus, telling people upfront what the AP is about helps players make characters that will want to engage in the AP and create hooks the GM can actually use. Everyone has a better time when players are building characters suited for the campaign. That's why the players guide "spoils" the war here: so that players don't get mislead into thinking the AP is about the Whispering Tyrant.