I mean we joke about it but I do think a lot of people hate the fact that Elphaba loves Glinda because that means Elphaba isn’t morally pure the way they want her to be lol. Like the mere fact that Elphaba is not only willing to forgive Glinda, but actually loves her continuously all the way throughout the entire story even when they’re on opposite sides introduces much more gray area to Elphaba’s supposed moral superiority and rationality, and makes it pretty clear that Elphaba also is prone to hypocrisy and favoritism and selfishness and overlooking someone’s objective moral failings simply because of her personal feelings for them. It’s a lot easier to prop Elphaba up as the perfect self-insert proxy if she’s passing righteous judgment on every “bad” person you don’t like and hates Glinda and thinks she should suffer for all time. But instead Elphaba’s looking at this complete fuckup of a person (affectionate) who is her dearest friend and still loving her because that’s what Elphaba would do. And people who want to project themselves onto her rather than seeing her as her own character reeeeeeeally don’t like that because that suggests their self-insert might have an extremely unheroic and unflattering flaw.
