I wish articles like these would acknowledge the existence of Innocent Sin at the least. Like that game has a canonically bisexual protagonist, and the gay romance in that game is considered canon because it's the one the devs had the most fun writing. Because it's not an Atlus thing on the whole. It's really specifically a problem with Katsura Hashino. I'm not surprised that the moment he leaves Persona, it immediately manages to shed off the worst of his male-gazey-anime-trope filled nonsense.
Like, we're talking about the guy whose excuse in having poor social links for female characters is "I have never forged a close friendship with a woman in my entire life".
It's even a thing in P5, where the character designer really wanted to go all-out in making the cast feel like outcasts of society (specifically, the original design for Takemi was going to be even more intense on the goth side), but Hashino kept demanding the designs to be toned down.
Like name who these things come from. For gods sake, SMT itself generally has pretty decent queer rep on the whole (even if some of it, particularly related to trans stuff is pretty bad/outdated at times but that's mostly the 2000s stuff), it's really specifically Hashino who has problems with queer rep in his stuff.