The main disagreement I have with this review, along with a good portion of the other criticism of The Last of Us Part II, is the idea that the game is trying to guilt-trip, you, the player, for the actions that your Player Character performs. This might be true if you were playing as a blank slate player character, and had the ability to choose which path in the story that you followed, but here, you're following Ellie and Abby's stories, and playing their parts. You can't force Ellie or Abby to do something that's not in their character just because you want the story to go a different direction any more than you can force Joel to walk away and let Ellie be sacrificed to create a vaccine in the first game.
I also don't think that having the player "forced" to pet the dogs that you'd been killing as Abby was manipulative. It goes to show that to Ellie, the dogs are threats that need to be killed, but to Abby, they're allies and friends who help kill the WLF's enemies. The idea that Ellie is killing in self-defense is also misguided, since she's invading the WLF and Seraphites' territory in order to kill members of the former group(she doesn't initially know about Abby going AWOL), and thus she's the aggressor from their point of view.
I can perfectly understand why you don't like Abby, but she shows a bit more remorse than you give her credit for. She actually seems to agree with Mel's The Reason You Suck Speech at the start of Day 3, and her conversations with Lev indicate that she doesn't believe helping him or his sister makes up for everything she's done. For better or worse, she does find something to live for besides revenge before Ellie does, possibly because she got her revenge when she murdered Joel and realizes it wasn't worth it. I also don't think the game necessarily expects you to forgive her and hate Ellie, but to understand that both characters are Not So Different.
Not liking the game is perfectly fair, but I think some of its critics are making faulty assumptions about the game's messages and how it expects the player to react to them, which isn't fair.
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Wasted Potential
Spoiler Alert.
The Last of Us Part II is a foray into Protagonist-Centered Morality, attempting to paint a single conflict in separate perspectives to give the player a sense of conflict about who they should support. I will admit, this had enormous potential to be a compelling story on the level of Captain America: Civil War. Unfortunately, it falls enormously short of that goal for several reasons.
First off, the game's aesop against revenge falls flat for multiple reasons. The first is that the game calls you out on violence...even if you try to commit to a Pacifist Run, and only you only kill Abby's circle of friends. The second is that the gameplay doesn't adhere to this concept of antiviolence. Any mooks encountered will by default try to kill Ellie, forcing her to protect herself, meaning she spends the vast majority of gameplay just trying to survive the trigger-happy Wolves and Seraphites. The third is that Abby herself never shows any conflict about the killing she commits, in stark contrast to how Ellie is rapidly unravelling as the game progresses. She kills just as much as Ellie, and she shows no emotional conflict over it...and the message of the game is violence and vengeance are bad.
Another reason the game failed with its story is because it tried to force us to feel certain ways about Ellie and Abby. For example, we're forced to kill Abby's dog, and the player was likely forced to kill several other dogs out of pragmatism as well as several people out to kill her. The player is forced to pet several of these same dogs as Abby to make us sympathize with her. Instead of being endearing, it comes across as manipulative.
For me, this game was a shallow, ham-fisted attempt to force me to sympathize with a truly horrible person in Abby Anderson and force me to be upset with Joel and Ellie. Instead of giving us legitimate choices to either be cruel or kind with either Ellie or Abby, they force us to be as cruel as possible with Ellie, and force us to be as "kind" as possible with Abby. It never felt real to me with Abby. Everything about her seemed selfish and superficial.
But that being said, I truly believe this game had enormous potential. After all, characters like Negan of the Walking Dead show how it is possible to make a character, even an evil one, likeable to fans after they committed horrible atrocities. It's just that The Last of Us Part II failed to make Abby endearing.