I'd actually say the use of the soulmate trope in Double Life makes a great case for all the worst parts of the soulmate trope, being used to enforce a social structure around shame, heavy restriction, punishment, and isolation.
Look Scar, Grian, BigB, and Ren. At the start of the season Scar was treated like an idiot for not looking for his soulmate, like it was a personal failing that he would take more interest in animals and call them his soulmates rather than look for the person he was bound to. Meanwhile a lot of the tension between BigB and Ren came from this idea that Ren's connection with Martyn- which had existed for seasons prior- was bad because Ren was supposed to, by dictate of the universe, be with BigB.
And then Grian and BigB form a connection outside their soulmates (which, for the record, they wanted to be together in episode one from before they even found out who their soulmates were, but felt like they weren't 'allowed' to be because they weren't soulmate) and are regarded as 'cheaters' with their soulmates being pitied for it.
Scott and Cleo were also scrutinized heavily within the server, regarded with pity, confusion, or even judgment by a number of people Multiple people acted awkward around them, or tried to 'console' them with the assumption that they were miserable, or in a very extreme case you had Jimmy calling their relationship "fake" multiple times and, during an argument, taunting them with "You ain't even real soulmates- when you go to bed at night, and you fall asleep, just remember, the last thought in your heads is 'oh, we're not really soulmates'."
And honestly I heavily suspect a large part of the reason Pearl was so isolated during Double Life is because of the isolation of soulmate pairs. Because soulmates were seen as this special connection superseding and outweighing any other, forming real connections outside of the soulmate pair was heavily discouraged. This meant that while plenty of people pitied Pearl (which also reinforced the idea that she should be miserable), she was always treated as part of an out-group by soulmate pairs, making it impossible for her to find real friends after being rejected by her soulmate.
There were many times as well where, generally, soulmate pairs who weren't happy together or who were having massive issues were pressured into trying to force things to work because they felt like they had to be with their soulmate and knew there was nowhere else for them to really go outside of that one connection, even if they weren't happy with it.
Not to mention the way the soulbound itself was, in multiple cases, abused and made into a tool of punishment in of itself. This is seen most apparently in the divorce quartet in which they all hurt themselves to "punish" the other. Scott came up with the idea of axe crits to "scare" their soulmates which Cleo was happy to join in with, and Pearl used methods such as powdered snow to "torture" Scott as well as specifically growing fond of holding the idea that she could kill them both over Scott's head. But even beyond it's use in the divorce quartet, Scar also very notably participated in this. In fact, he was the one who came up with the idea to use powdered snow to "torture" your soulmate because Scar wanted a way to punish Grian for asking him to help with chores.
Like I genuinely just cannot stress enough how much Double Life was a proof of concept for the soulmate trope being a complete nightmare. Literal horror trope.
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