For real?

I don’t know why you expect someone’s FIRST project to be perfect or anything close to it. The author even states in their a/n that they agonized over this ending, so clearly it was trouble for them.

This doesn't have anything to do with my own preferences, it's about the expectations that the author themselves have built up for us. It sounded like they put a LOT of thought into the series and how it should end. And it's been going pretty smoothly structure-wise through it all. So why rush it now?
Maybe there's some reason for it - we don't know and probably never will - but the truth of it stays the same: it's a hella shitty ending.

This is worded just right. It felt like they had a much more complicated, well-thought-out ending in mind, but decided to rush and ret-con the flow of events/relationships that they themselves had built up.

Apparently some huge shit went down with Lezhin (the original site this story is from) authors weren’t getting the amount of money they were promised or something like that and on top of it were on unrealist deadlines. I think it was this one actually where there were several hiatuses from the issue. When questioned on tumblr the Lezhin ppl either denied the rumours or flat out ignored them. This sadly isn’t the only story that suffered a rushed ending due to what happened.

*Unrealistic sorry. Very cold hard to type.
As a continuation tho. You’re right, where this story seemed to be going could have been fantastic.

Yes, I was afraid that was the case with this story, as well. It really is shitty that they have to put up with Lezhin's shit like this, and I could understand that they felt as if they had to rush the ending because of it. I also get that they can't exactly badmouth them directly in the afterword, but we're not really getting a clear picture of the situation. Critique-wise it all still stands, but of course I can be lenient about the circumstances.