How could you like that? In the game Bill being gay was completely subtle and understated. Most of the interaction was getting the car battery in a town packed with zombies because Bill owed Joel a favor from his raiding days. It was about the intense crawl through town and into the school, with the bloater attacking at the end. Bill and Ellie talking shit the entire time was in there. The show? Fucking Hallmark Presents Two Faggots who Joel comes to loot after they are long dead. Zero direct impact on the main story and no real interactions that grow out Ellies character. No filling in the blanks on some of Joel's checkered past. Zero. And most importantly not one fucking zombie to be seen to remind everyone that yeah this is a zombie apoc show with real danger and stakes. The entire episode may as well have never existed, as far as advancing the story is concerned. Druckman was basically like "well the subtle messaging the original creator put in is not obvious enough, I better do everything short of Ron Swanson smoking pole on screen to drive the agenda home" and also basically completely isolated everything from the main story interaction.
These shows have ten fucking episodes, if that. Wasting them on disconnected vanity side show Emmy bait that has no direct connection to the main plot is not something you can do in that structure, gay shit aside. Back in the 26 episodes a season era, yeah you can fuck around and do some one offs. When you got ten episodes to translate 20 hours of story into, you cannot fuck about on side shit.