The pairings and the ending can't be looked at separately. It was trash because of them.
You can't force all 3 main characters (team 7) into roles they were never meant to be in and have anything positive come out of it. Every other character is connected to one or more of them in some way and so they fail to get a proper resolution because of the main 3 not getting a proper resolution.
Everyone should understand that nothing good will come out of something that is FORCED. Naruto forces himself to be with Hinata and so he is miserable. A good movie comes out and the studio forces a sequel to make more money and so it sucks. Kishi forces himself to do NHSS for whatever reason and his work as well as all offshoots of it suck (and I get the impression he wasn't even prescient enough to know that this would happen. For whatever reason.)
There aren't very many exceptions to this. If something good comes out of something that was forced then it's because someone with talent and passion for whatever it is got involved. No one like that works at SP.
Don't ever force anything creative that you do. It will suck.
I disagree. The pairings were an ember to an already burning dumpster fire. Had they been done well, they could have mitigated the terrible ending, but they were not the cause and they would not have saved it.
Part 2’s main objective was to set up the Naruto-Sasuke fight at the end. As it progressed it was clear it was setting both a physical and metaphysical fight. But the whole thing fell on its face because Sasuke never developed a coherent philosophy that audience could at least understand or emphasize with. It made no sense at all. Worse, after they draw, Sasuke basically says, okay let’s do it your way. He doesn’t appear sold on Naruto’s way and nothing is said to make a convince case why Sasuke should have agreed other than that his own was so poor, Naruto’s wins by default. He lost a fight..so what? What did that show him about Naruto’s philosophy or what did he come to understand in the process. Nothing that I can see.
Speaking of philosophy, the pairings had nothing to do with the series, and Naruto in particular, avoiding natural (and expected) reactions to Naruto redemptions. Gedo Mazo, leaving it to nameless mooks to cheer Kakashi nearly killing Obito, etc.
Changing the pairings or improving the writing around would not have fixed that. It would have no given Kaguya a character or undone Naruto’s “cool guy” line,
The parings were bad, but pale in comparison to everything else because they all deal with the series core plot and basic message. For me, the pairings were a major contributor this mess in only one case and that was 693 when Sakura’s entire character development was tossed in the trash, but then again, by that point, it was already an disaster that couldn’t be fixed.