I love dunk, don't get me wrong. But if you ever watch an actual interview with him in it? The guy is kind of an idiot. He's just hysterical in the moment. His comments on the story really tend to illustrate he can't tell the difference between contrived/manipulative writing and good, character driven writing. All that matters to him is if the writing evokes certain feelings (And the last of us 2 certainly uses every cheap trick to do that).
The writing is just cheap. Its like GOT Season 8/TLJ, where you can tell someone wanted shock value and "subverted expectations" but wasn't good enough to write those things into a Universe that ALREADY had developed characters and rules. So instead of writing a compelling narrative that slowly changes those characters and rules, and THEN going for the shock, the writer went for the shock and then did a bunch of manipulative things to associate emotions how best to rationalize the shock (Ooo, see, this person is nice to dogs, while the other person is MEAN to them!!!!!!! Now think about Joel dying with that emotional context in your head!) They also broke the characters rules/personalities which really made the shocks feel extra cheap. (Even Joel's ambush feels cheap--Joel, the guy who could smell an ambush in 1, now implicitly trusts a group he just met?)
This game is bad and its not because of the She-Man, or even Joel's death. Its bad because yet another person has confused "different" and "shocking" with good, and was in such a rush to justify their "shock" that they accidentally dove headfirst into their own asshole mining out some thin reasoning for it. (And don't get me wrong, Joel dying was NOT the issue. The issue was how it was done.) But by far the worst part of it all is the obtuse, hamfisted "revenge message", as others here have pointed out, ends up being contradictory. The ending doesn't say what the story has been trying to spell out. Which just makes it go from bad to terrible; because the game is REALLY fucking confident, to the point of being arrogant/obtuse in its messaging...So when that messaging ends up being contradicted inadvertently? It's just rage inducing. It's like trying to listen to a hypocrite preach at you about X rule while flagrantly violating it.
So glad I didn't buy this garbage.