To me, it's always important to create the atmosphere that you wanted to address. Hand-holding is 50-50 chance of either love or friendship. Fairy Tail used this as friendship when dealing the dragon as they said it themselves. Pretty much you need either someone say it, shows it, or let the atmosphere take it away.
If you want to make it clear as day for hand-holding situation, well if you're going for love, one or both of them should be like shocked in "Is she in love with me?" or "What is this feeling?..." Another tactic is to provide third-party point of view. In Major, the protagonist decides to help the love interest after she was pretty much depressed, so when they hold hands, they were sharing strong feelings, that the side characters were happy and the other one was like, "Say what!?" Blushing or dazing does add it up.
As for hug, well I haven't seen a friendly moment, though if it happens often with multiple characters, then it's no big deal. That said hug is stronger when context is being done right. Downplay can only happened when the follow-up, scenery, or atmosphere is not so lovely. This is important because if you just have a hug and no one providing the "Whoa" factor or having one character who is receiving that hug to show anything, then it's either one sided or not just strong. Unless of course if there's a plot ensured as in the hug is happening in the middle of conversation/interaction rather the last moment. Let's take chapter 450. I really don't want to be biased, but sorry, Kishi made it hard to ignore the scene. Naruto received an unexpected hug, Naruto looked dazed, the atmosphere/background has shown that one feels like "Love is in the air," the other while blushing, "Whoa...", the other goes "Lucky!" with a smile. Now, how can you tell me love context is not there. Yes, they're not lovers, but you can't diminish the idea of it and that's important in writing. Why you think we never got Hinata being like in the same level of Team 7 love triangle, let alone NS.
Look, in all honesty, if it's vice versa, I would still go by my words, even it's NH and while I don't hate it, I just let it slide. My point is that people has given too much credit or give one moment to equal multiple moments of another, which is non-sense. This is why I had to read 3-5 times of 615 before posting anything. Well, here we are, 650, and my mind is still the same.