My feelings on the slash ships vs male friendships argument that occasionally pops up is that if other people shipping two male characters with each other genuinely ruins your ability to appreciate the intimate male friendship depicted in canon, that says a lot more about your personal anxieties and insecurities than it does about shippers or culture at large
The argument is typically about devaluation of friendships, right? that imposing romance/sex on these canonically non-romantic, non-sexual relationships between men implies that friendship without those elements is "lesser" or "not enough"
And I am sympathetic to a fruatration with devaluation of friendship and I do agree that the language shippers use or the argument they put forth in favour of why their ship is a valid reading of the text or going to become canon or whatever, that this is sometimes language or arguments that imply the superiority of romance and sex over relationships without those features
But the thing about it is that
1) the canon version of the relationship in question typically is a non-sexual, non-romantic one, the mainstream version of this story is one that puts emphasis on and values male friendship, which is prove in and of itself that there is no danger of stories about the importance of male friensships drying up
2) this is an issue far, far more prevalent in the depiction of relationships between men and women, like there actually is a lack of stories that center non-romantic, non-sexual male-female friendships, there genuinely are people who see every non-familial male-female interaction in the light of romance, yet it's the slash ships that get hit with this accusation of devaluing friendship
At the end of the day, how other people interpret a piece of media really doesn't have to affect your own relationship to a piece of media. It's perfectly fine not to like a ship! It's not homophobic to prefer a male friendship to a gay romance. Getting angry about other people engaging "incorrectly" with a fiction relationship is immature and in the case of the "devalueing male friendships" argument it is also homophobic
I have a straight male friend who really values Frodo and Sam's friendship and who doesn't personally read it as romantic, who indeed is a man with intimate, non-sexual, non-romantic relationship with other men and thus find that interpretation personally meaningful. But he's not immature or a homophobe, so he doesn't feel the need to complain or argue if someone else makes a reference to them as a couple in his presence. We all agree that the relationship is important and endearing, why would we have to agree on the particulars of whether they fuck or not?
If you find shippers annoying, that's perfectly reasonable because shippers often are annoying (I say as a shipper). But at the end of the day, the only reason to position slash interpretations and platonic interpretations as enemies is homophobia