Dirk behaving like this isn't inherently problematic; like, my gripe on homophobia isn't because Dirk is gay and does these things, but rather that Dirk the only character who is explicitly gay and explicitly has that identity explored as a FOCAL point of his character and then gets tarnished with the worst of bigoted gay portrayals. If Dirk's sexuality was just an incidental part of his character, would it still suck? Sure, but I don't think it'd feel as egregiously homophobic.

Dirk absolutely struggles with being manipulative; he worries that he is an inherently evil person and he is prone to keeping his friends in the dark because he wants to handle all the negative and "hard" decisions, to keep them "innocent" or out of harms way, ignoring how he basically disregards their autonomy and their input. He winds up even manipulating his own actions by wayside of HAL. The end goal of the Epilogues can be achieved WITHOUT Dirk doing half the shit he does; especially what he does with Dave and Karkat.

Dave's repressed bisexuality is an arc that by the end of Homestuck ends with Dave asking him for advice on how to come out; a clear idea that there is some kind of positive resolution going (and also, the comic ended staunchly with the idea that Davekat has ALREADY HAPPENED. They even went on to tweet about it being canon.) The Epilogues walk all of that back and decide to take the conclusion of Davekat OUT of their hands and put it firmly into the grip of Dirk's narrating; where he lauds over the story with a LOT of homophobic language at times too, IIRC he even refers to Dave and Karkat as "bottoms" derisively, and as I said before, we get confirmation of Dave's autonomy in this moment, but nothing for Karkat. It feels like a really bad parody of gay men trying to groom younger peers. It wasn't NEEDED in the story. It really wasn't. The entire moment exists for shock value.

Dirk's story and the greater story of how queer male sexuality is handled by Homestuck is a conclusion I'm drawing based on the whole tapestry we have available now. I don't think it's far fetched to state that Hussie started out with some edgy and bigoted views that they obviously worked through AS the comic was releasing, but that doesn't also mean that they've become a paragon in writing because they've owned up to some things. I still think they have a ways to go to unpack the way they write about homosexuality around men in the context of the story.

(Also, people are fixating purely on Dirk but my post was about how sexuality is handled for ALL homoerotic interactions between men.)

As for not trusting Andrew's writing, the outline of the Epilogues was penned by them, it wasn't a story invented by the people Hussie commissioned to finish it and they haven't exactly elaborated on who was responsible for those particular Dirk scenes, so I'm not going to harp about authors I can't ascribe and I don't think it's even useful to do. It's Hussie's IP and they cosigned the release; if they found it particularly objectionable I feel like they would have asked those scenes be excluded.

I'll leave it up to sapphic individuals to decide how they feel about Rose's story, though some of the people I know found it beyond a bit fucked up that the story now has a trans woman (if that's the route they want to go with Jade, I'm still not sure where the official canon lies because as much as the epilogues are progressive, they lack hard on the trans woman front) and a lesbian decided to come together and sexualize the name of their child as if that's a completely normal thing to do. [Addendum to this, I think the current team are trying to recontextualize the naming choice, but it's still just a bad character decision. It feels more like a name Caliborn or Gamzee would pick out for a baby.]

Whether any gay men being involved in the writing or story crafting would have changed what Hussie eventually wanted to say, we'll never really know; hypotheticals aside, we exist in the timeline where this is the story we have.