Your first statement, I’d say trying to see the game through a different lens and just accepting it for that might help assuage those awful, cringey feelings it left you with. What I mean by that is, that was kinda the point: to take what you loved about the original and
dismantle it, acknowledging that it
can happen even in an entertainment medium that generally avoids that kind of thing, and attempt to change the audience’s perspective on something; in this case, the entire characters of Ellie
and Abby. When you think of it, the undoing of Ellie and Joel’s relationship was already clear by the original’s conclusion anyways, paving the way for a different thread.