*pats pats* I can understand that dilemma. Hate is a very passionate emotion, while indifference/apathy is defined by lack of passion. How's that quote go—the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference? I'd also find it harder to get into a ship where one party outright doesn't care about the other, while mutual or even one-sided hate are prime shipping grounds.
But in this case, without any real insight into your head, I'd wager a guess that you're experiencing this disconnect because you have critically picked up on the undercurrents of Sukuna and Yuuji's relationship but are consciously too caught up in what Sukuna says.
He be lyin' though. To himself, most of all. There's a reason I specified he must be in denial in that post you saw.
Sukuna very badly wants Yuuji to be boring. He wants Yuuji to not matter—for his ideals to be foolish, for his will to wither. Most importantly, Sukuna wants to be completely unaffected by Yuuji. He tries to emphasize this so many times in so many ways: he never calls Yuuji by name (except once at the beginning and then at the very end), he belittles and mocks Yuuji at every opportunity, and he says in a variety of ways that Yuuji's boring and inconsequential.
But look at his actions, the way he behaves. From the beginning, whenever he takes over Yuuji, Sukuna tries to do things that will not only bring him joy but also shatter Yuuji, and the degree of his targeted malice only increases as the story progresses. The devastation at Shibuya is a natural consequence of Sukuna's fight with Jogo and then Mahoraga, but that final moment where he takes care to lead Yuuji to the very edge of the crater, taunting him while making sure Yuuji will witness the full scale of the devastation the instant he opens his eyes? That's so intensely personal.
And it only gets worse after Sukuna switches to Megumi's body; there are glaring contradictions between what he tells Yuuji and how he acts/reacts. Honestly, even his interior monologue contradicts what he says half the time. Both in the last few chapters of "Cursed Womb: Under Heaven" and "The Decisive Battle in the Uninhabited, Demon-Infested Shinjuku," there's a running thread of Sukuna verbally dismissing Yuuji while actively being shocked, offended, confused, and even cornered by his actions. And whenever the battle narrows to just the two of them, you have Sukuna continuously needling Yuuji to get a rise out of him, while Yuuji's fixated on just tearing into him and saving Megumi—until Yuuji's domain expansion, that is.
The crux of it is there in Chapter 248, explicitly realized by Sukuna himself. Sharing a body with Yuuji, their souls coexisting in excruciating proximity, forced Sukuna to understand and be aware of Yuuji in a way that's deeply uncomfortable to Sukuna, both because of his character and because of how diametrically opposed Yuuji's values and ideals are to Sukuna's nature. Even the very act of understanding Yuuji discomfits Sukuna. Naturally, he resolves to shatter those ideals and Yuuji himself.
Yuuji's DE and its aftermath also illustrate this. You have Sukuna outright saying he feels "absolutely nothing" about the humanity Yuuji showcased only to become incandescently angry the instant he perceives Yuuji as pitying him. There's nothing apathetic about the way he resolves to tear apart everyone Yuuji loves before killing him; he even admits out loud that he's surprised by the intensity of his hatred.
Fundamentally, Yuuji changed him, and Sukuna fucking hated it the entire time—the premonition, the process, the result. He's so insistent on Yuuji meaning nothing because to accept otherwise challenges the very foundation Sukuna built his existence on. To him, Yuuji is an existential threat, and we see it realized in the afterlife scene, where Sukuna admits to wanting to try a kinder path in life. That's one hell of an admittance coming from him, but it's also an admittance he could only have made in death, in loss.
In the end, he died cradled by Yuuji, verbally rejecting him using Yuuji's own words while simultaneously acknowledging Yuuji by using his proper name. And ain't that sukuita in a nutshell?
Even outside of the shipping goggles, they're a central narrative-driving force in the final arc and for good reason.
I do think the development of this relationship could have benefited from (a) the Shinjuku Showdown arc having a tighter focus, instead of being so drawn out and haphazard, and (b) Yuuji's DE and the parts around it being expanded to cover a Heian era flashback as well as more insights into Yuuji's understanding of Sukuna. I read or skimmed like twenty chapters just to put this post together because while I trust my memory, I wanted concrete references, and it really showed how scattered the emotional core of the Sukuna gauntlet is.
