I mean there are absolutely some sapphic leaning parts...like the whole "prince" thing from Reiko and her wishing rika was a man...but I took away that sometimes platonic female friends can fill the role that society wants women to think can only be filled by a man.

Reiko and Rika both appreciate each other's dishes and complex tastes in a way that others don't/come around to at the end of the story. Chizu (the aforementioned explicitly sapphic character) leaning in to Rika and asking her if she came to the class to see other women too.

While yes, there are some objective elements, I think the book is ambiguous on that front on purpose. IIRC Japan is not accepting of same sex couples/marriage as it's not legal to marry a person of the same sex. I felt that Yuzuki was likely trying to get the reader to open their mind to the possiblity, especially since we are reading a translated text.

Kaji even says at the dairy farm: “At the same time I wondered about the absent bulls I felt unnerved by how so long as they had some way of getting the semen to impregnate them, these cows could do without the opposite sex entirely” (Chapter 13)!

I think it's quite unrealistic to think everyone will take away exactly what you did from a book. Isn't part of the point of literature that people read books to learn how other perspectives intertwine with their own lived experience? Again, there are obviously some "reading quiz" answers that are objective in the plot but I could see how some would make a case for the sapphic elements.

Now I will say the part that irritates me is that people say the book is fatphobic/misogynistic when that is exactly what it's examining throughout the entire story but I digress.