It is even more apparent that he either didn't write the ending himself or anything when they ask him questions about the future and he is like "I don't know." I mean, you are the writer, how do you not know what happens?
"I don't know how SasuSaku got together"
How do you not know? You just put two people together and said "They are together. Not sure why or if there even is a reason, but it is there."
90% sure that he was up to his ears in meddling executives and editors for at least the whole last year of the manga. There's no way anyone can deny that, at this point. Slightly more debatable: his scrotum was in a vice for at least half of part 2. How else do you explain the inconsistencies in the plot? Even I don't think he's that incompetent. "Sakura wants to be strong and stand beside her teammates," to "I don't know how to write Sakura tbh," to "she's no more important to the story than, say, Kiba or Rock Lee," over the course of one year? Are you kidding me? The funny thing about Naruto, as a whole, is how little sense craptastic parts make behind the scenes. Like, is the guy a rebelling genius, or a comically lucky jackass who managed to accidentally write a story with a brilliant beginning and middle? If he's so terrible at writing romances (as he himself proclaims and as the evidence shows, if he's to be believed when he says that the current state of the story was all according to plan), how in the world did he manage to write a decade-long, believable slow-burn romance before bringing it all down in a raging inferno like it was a straw hut? Nothing makes sense anymore.