The reality is, TLOU2's story and writing is actually still too nuanced and subtle for countless people out there.
I've been trying to understand how people can misread a work so drastically far longer than LoU2 has been out. I don't have any solid answers, but I think I can safely say that this isn't the actual problem. Or, it's not the reason that people don't 'get' the themes.
It's less that they don't get it and more that they don't
want it. Like, if a player picks up Last of Us 2 for some Joel action or failing that just hanging out with Joel for a big part of the game, seeing Joel and Ellie ride out together for their revenge like post-apocalyptic cowboys, they aren't going to give a fuck whatever other themes or stories are at play here.
Now, whether they don't seek these things out by choice (usually as a backlash against what they percieve as condescension by people telling them 'they need to look deeper, they can't just care about power fantasies') or whether they legitimately can't see the value in the more nuanced way of storytelling that LoU2 offers. I don't know how one would determine that, because in either case they wouldn't even try because telling them to look for these things is futile since they are fundamentally uninterested in these things.
But they are stuck at an impasse because saying you just want Joel to be your apocalpytic cowboy isn't something critics are really supposed to do. It feels like your admitting you're not a deep critic if you don't like the challenging narrative over the easy wish fulfillment.
So when asked, they tend to explain it in terms of what they wanted and how the game didn't give it to them. Most obviously this is with Abby. I've watched entire streams of people asking "why are you making me play as her? She's the villain, she's psycho" even as Abby was doing nice things. But the question was rhetorical. They never seemed to actually try to find an actual answer for why ND would switch protagonists on them. THe question actually just meant "I don't want to be playing as her. She's supposed to be the mustache twirling evildoer that Ellie has to kill, like David from the first game. How did they mistakenly make her playable?"
Idk, it's really hard to undersatnd what is going on sometimes, but I'm pretty confident that these people aren't simply failing at being good at reading a story. If thats what they were, then they'd simply accept the nuanced explanations they're given when they ask. But they almost never do. They instead are in this constipated state where they just don't understand why ND did this, which reads to me that they're mad that ND didn't do something fundamentally different with the story as opposed to simply not understanding what ND did.