Astarion, by the way, always wants to Ascend. At the same time, friendly Ascended Astarion communicates with the player quite normally, without any attempts of " abuse". It feels like it's not "you can't Ascend him", but "you can't love him". The punishment given to the player is for exactly that.
That is such an interesting point. Although since the abuse with a romanced A. Astarion only happens if the player requests a kiss, I think it simply serves to show how disjointed Astarion's character became with Patch 6. He communicates with the player quite normally outside of those kisses. Since looking at the interview with Mx Welch I think maybe there is an element of seeing the player as a thirsty person using the romance to satisfy their kinks, therefore the more kinks Larian put in the game, the better.
Regardless of whether my speculation is right, what Larian have done with Patch 6 is make A.Astarion completely inconsistent as a character. And at the same time, they are railroading the Player Character into being aligned to 'good' and suffering because of their love. Loss of player autonomy should not happen in an RPG and ruining a well-written character just to get another kink on the game's 'bingo card' is completely the wrong direction to go in, in my opinion.
