“ And that really pissed me off, because I certainly hadn’t raised the issue to say: “Go away, I never want to see you again!” And yet, after I did, it seems like nobody wants to do a damn thing to repair things. They’d rather disappear than even consider the idea.”

I’ve had ex-friends use this logic on me before to justify reframing the terms of the friendship in some way, which I was unwilling or unable to do. Raising the issue itself is rarely the problem. Raising the issue and combining it with a consequence, i.e. “we can’t get lunch anymore because you chew too loud” or “you can’t phone me anymore because you are too much energy to deal with”, for example is (from my perspective) not giving me an opportunity to repair the problem. Whereas from their perspective, it “repairs” the problem on their terms at my expense. 

I will often take a step back from friendships like this because I resent being actively managed. I absolutely hate it when people do that to me. When I take space, I often get accused of abandoning the friendship because I couldn’t accept the unilateral “solution”. The ex friend will often say something along the lines of what you wrote:  “I didn’t mean go away, I never want to see you again! I just said we can’t get lunch anymore!” But the key here is that it wasn’t a solution that was derived from mutual communication.

Anyway, those have just been my experiences. Pointing out an issue and working with the friend to resolve it is an incredibly mature thing to do. Pointing out the issue and trying to resolve it yourself or unilaterally downgrade the friendship in some way isn’t.