this is gonna sound lowkey crazy for me to say, but i do think that's just like... the way it fucks with your brain when you read it the one time when it came out. most of my friends that felt similarly were pretty fine after a reread, but i also get that it's a pretty big ask.

the bright side is that there's a lot of people that did end up writing alt endings where things are relatively peachy and/or keen, but i also get that isn't like. "canon," so it gets harder to soothe the woes. that said, i always did personally take the epilogues less as "a happy ending is impossible" thing, and more of "a happy ending will take more work than this" thing.

not to rant about themes or ideas or whatever, but i guess i've always taken homestuck as a deconstruction-reconstruction (not related) of the young adult escapism genre (ie. harry potter, which andrew hussie clearly hates more than anything), where the main thesis of the epilogues is "suffering as a child doesn't inherently make you a well-adjusted adult, and saving the world as a kid is probably a very easy way to make you kinda miserable in the specific way where you refuse to unpack it." hilariously i was talking to some friends last night about steven universe and realized that su: future was the same exact thing, just less. well. y'know. anyway, all of that to say, i don't think it necessarily needs to be a "and then everything sucked for everyone forever and you were wrong for caring about these people" ending. especially since the message becomes "and then everyone needed to put in more work to become good people" by the end of the epilogues/beginning of hs2.