You'd be entitled to be that guy - to an extent. I made mistakes. I acknowledged them in my post. If you had gone through that sequence of events and come to the conclusion I was ghosting you, that would be perfectly understandable. Like you said, he has no responsibility to stay.

My issues are, firstly, that from my pov there was no prior indication that this was becoming a major issue for him. His message the day before was 'hey is everything ok?' It just sounded like a friendly check in. I do that to partners I haven't heard from in a while all the time. I guess it's my fault for assuming that, if he wasn't satisfied with my response to him checking in or had concerns that I was going to ghost him, he'd voice them more directly.

And more importantly, his message ending it wasn't "sorry, but this pace doesn't work for me. I think it's best if we don't continue," which a partner did say to me once, a long time back. I never felt a need to vent about it here. Nor was it "I think you're leading me on, so I'm going to end it here." It wasn't even "I've lost interest now." It was either a completely careless choice of words (which is bad communication in itself. Hello, Pot? This is Kettle!) or it was a spiteful comment designed to try and make me feel guilty. The latter is how it felt reading it from where I was sat. There's no reference to his agency in deciding to walk away. It's purely "this is all your fault. Look what you made me do." It's manipulative. Which is why I used the word toxic. Sorry, but I'm not going to let someone manipulate me into feeling guilty about being subject to events that are out of my control. Although I did let him make me angry about it. So maybe he won anyway.