The issue is that romance tends to be prioritized over friendship in media even for straight relationships, and so many romantic relationships are incredibly shallow or have very little reasoning behind them (the "I met this guy I have nothing in common with 2 days ago and we're so totally in love let's shoehorn in a sex scene" thing is played out so often for hetero romances) and LGBT relationships are so rare, that any subtext that even remotely hints at a queer romantic relationship has people grasping at straws. So companies use that to their advantage. They just dangle the barest hints of anything, because that's all they need to get people. And they dare not show anything more than the tiniest of subtext anyways, because anything LGBT is considered sexually explicit by default. Just look at how much the creators behind The Legend of Korra and Steven Universe had to fight for the queer romances in their respective shows. Both almost got cancelled because the writers wanted to show those relationships (and the Korra one was even completely unintentional, the writers just kinda realized it was developing over the course of the series and decided to go all in on it).
Edit: Forgot the part where they don't openly hint at or mention it because they don't want to piss off the homophobes. They want to straddle that line that let's them have their cake and eat it too.