we gotta check off a box so here's a token gay dude

It's not even so much a cynical "token" gay dude to appeal to the ... whoever likes gay dudes market any more. It's an enthusiastic "oh, we're changing the world! We're righting the wrongs of the past! We're representing poor, pathetic, 'marginalized' and oppressed people! Look at how good we are!"

I'll take the cynical marketing move over the true believers any day.

If characters were simply gay, these people would lose their minds.

They would never tolerate a 'gay' character that does literally everything normally, but has a same-sex partner that no one brings attention to, mentions, or even considers relevant in any meaningful way.

Yes. They need to accept that being gay simply isn't normal. And just like how the default mode of a man without socialization/civilization is that of a brute, being gay comes with some proclivities that they need to keep control of (for men in particular it's exceptionally easy to acquire sex from other men, so they're almost all severe man whores).

Also the fictional characters aside, the real people who like this sort of thing don't realize just how utterly uninteresting all of this gay shit is. It's like how teenage girls think claiming bisexuality or whatever other vogue sexuality makes them more interesting somehow. It doesn't. But they don't care, they just want their validation from <Corporation>. It's demented.

And finally all of this has probably damaged the viability of gay characters in not-shitty media. Once we get past this, if someone wants to include a gay character in their work, as soon as it comes out that they're gay everybody who's not an intersectionalist fool is just going to roll their eyes and assume the worst.

That and also an issue is the activism and the virtue signaling. And how certain writers treat them like some kind of special protected class instead of just normal characters that happen to be queer