as an older homestuck fan who was there when all of this transpired, there are a few other bad takes that extremely contributed to this whole mess.
one was the idea that because Bro Strider was purportedly abusive towards Dave, that meant that Dirk had the makings of an abuser in him, and was therefore tainted. for many readers, he was damned before he had a chance to represent himself any better... and whatever positive or negative traits he displayed going forward were judged with this foundational belief already set.
to be clear, I see Bro's abuse as something that, to some degree, came about because of outside influences. the Lil Cal that Bro kept all his life was the real deal, fully possessed, and capable of doing weird things to a person's head. my main evidence is something brought up by Optimistic Duelist over on youtube... he observed that a lot of Bro's traits line up more with Caliborn than with Dirk... most notably, the heteronormativity, hyper masculinity, making weird porn, obsession with puppets, and setting up Saw style traps in the apartment. I believe the phrase, "would you like to play a game" is something Caliborn actually says to Dirk at one point, and Dirk is Caliborn's favorite human to bother. all the other beta universe guardians have interests that line up a lot cleaner with their alpha kid selves, so to me, this checks out.
this is not to 100% absolve Bro of any responsibility for this, but it does explain a legitimate discrepancy in behavior. in other news: the whole idea of "if Bro was abusive, then Dirk must have abuser traits" is primarily a nature vs. nurture argument. many people are dead set on the idea that if you were bad in one timeline, you are incapable of being truly forgiven in any other timeline, even if you act differently in that one, because the makings of a bad person are still within you. it's a deeply essentialist view of people that totally ignores the reality that anyone can be a bad person, and it is our choices that define us. no... to some, it's once bad, always bad. no exceptions.
this isn't helped by the fact that Dirk already has other selves that are active in the story, and sometimes represent him badly. most notably, the autoresponder is a pretty nefarious seeming presence right off the bat. and for as much anxiety as it causes Dirk to think that the AR might represent his full intentions to others, that's exactly how a lot of fans took it. many readers viewed the AR as controlling, manipulative, dismissive of other people's feelings and input... and many folks refused to acknowledge that the AR is both a hyper competent AI, and based on Dirk's 13 year old self. technically, the AR is only 3 years old during the story... and it is only because it is an AI that it could come into being fully formed the way it did. and it is also as an AI that it learned quickly, and very differently from real Dirk, or any human... and eventually outstripped Dirk's level of knowledge by a wide margin, all of which changes how it behaves. people tend to chalk up the flaws in the AR's behavior to specifically the fact that it's a replica of Dirk when he was 13, without considering its technical youth or growth in this odd, artificial way.
and when you combine the insistence that the flaws stem only from Dirk's personality, with the essentialist "once bad, always bad" mindset... you end up with Dirk receiving a lot of blame for the AR. some people would even fully conflate the two, stating that the AR and Dirk shared a goal of getting Jake to date Dirk, and even if Dirk was only passively benefiting from the AR's manipulation, he certainly wasn't stopping it. which edges into some small grain of truth, but really, what was Dirk actually supposed to do about the AR that he didn't try doing in the comic? Dirk is shown to consider the AR as a living thing that he is responsible for... and short of shutting the thing off, essentially killing it... what would've been the solution?
I don't doubt that Dirk was a flawed 13 year old... he's even flawed as a 16 year old! but the AR's problems are it's own, and the AR is a problem to Dirk. when Dirk deals with the AR, he deals with it as an outsider to its perspective, just like everyone else.
but the last and wildest thing I want to mention is how people used to compare the situation between Dirk and Jake, to the one between Vriska and Tavros... and in reality, I could see a case being made for these two pairs as narrative foils for each other. but I think the reason why this comparison stuck, was due to the whole uranium thing. Jake needed it, Dirk could've helped him get it, but instead Dirk made him work for it. the difference is that Dirk isn't asking Jake to do something terribly unreasonable. Jake actually can handle himself against the Brobot, and the Brobot itself doesn't put Jake in any real danger. I'm running the risk of quoting Optimistic Duelist's whole videos on the subject, but to be fair, he summed it all up rather nicely.
anyway, those were the biggest contributors that I can remember to all the bad faith takes on dirkjake from back in the day. I didn't even ship it particularly hard, but I did get really steamed about the constant misreading of Dirk's character, which the epilogues only make all the worse... it's pretty transparent why they would've chosen to vilify him.
