I feel like a lot of people who cry that Yugis character arc has been ruined by DSOD don't realize that the entire point of yugioh is that self-sacrifice and relying on friends is the key to the future.
Yugi is not made weaker by getting help from Atem he is made stronger.
DSOD also fixed one of the biggest problems with the original yugioh manga ending. Which is that the story over time developed this weird subtext that in order to be independent Yugi has to "man up" and while Takahashi definitely tried to still present Yugi with a softer interpretation of masculinity in the end it falls a little flat when the last page is Yugi standing in the desert giving the coldest dialogue the character ever had five minutes after his best friend died.
And I think people tend to forget that because the anime is a lot softer than the manga.
DSOD gives Yugi more emotional complexity about his best friend dying, than just kind of getting over it real quick.
It presents us with a Yugi that perfectly continues from the manga, but now it gives us this layer of understanding that instead of getting over it over the span of five minutes, he is pretending that he did and tries to push his emotions away.
Kaiba of all characters becomes the character who now has to teach Yugi the lesson that the past is important. Which is something he struggled with while Atem was "alive".
And while he is aggressive and self-absorbed, Kaiba also learns to be softer and kinder. That moment when Atem returns is there to show Yugi that Kaiba was right. Kaiba finally got the lesson and was able to be there for Yugi in a moment were Yugi almost stopped believing.
It is very obvious that Takahashi thought about it for a long time, and he was obviously a lot older when he wrote DSOD and you can tell a lot of his personal opinions on politics, relationships, faith and death changed as he got older. The way death is presented in DSoD is not the same as in the original Yugioh manga. Kaiba entering the afterlife is VERY different than Atem leaving. Death is presented as a recconection between friends and not as seperation. Something the original manga tried to do but I think DSOD does a lot better.
