In a sense this is one of the most frustrating dramas I have ever watched, but in another it's rather beautiful, there is a lot of very well written witty dialog in the show. I think the leads had great chemistry both as "friends" & lovers . Why the scare quotes? Well, their friendship is insanity & all the reasons why they did not take that step for so long are insanity squared. The writer really dropped the ball here romantic plot wise, all it would have taken to somewhat plausibly justify the slow burn is to just remove the 10 minutes from the first 14 episodes where they declared their eternal friendship to each other after a crazy acts of love. (or god forgive just replace those scenes with some wistful starting, whatever)
Though the show is quite repetitive from e6~ up to episode 15, since every episode has one moment of insane escalation that fizzles out & these are very similar almost every time.

From e15 onward the romance picks up & things start happening at a reasonable rate from then on. I would say that the second half of the show could have had more emotional impact, but cdramas will be cdramas, overall this was quite enjoyable to me.

As for the things outside of the leads' personal world, well the work drama part was okay-ish, mostly because more often than not the work related scenes transitioned back to ML + FL interactions, so I did not have time to become bored, let alone annoyed.
As for the usual political messaging this show is alright, there is some here and there, but it's not too egregious or immersion breaking.

The leads have a married couple for their best friends, but they don't really have a story worth mentioning, they were just a plot device to stall for even more time early on, just to annoy us viewers.

As for the most popular third couple I'm not sure what the fuss is about in the comment section. They were cute, but they only had like 15 minutes together in 30 episodes, so I'm not particularly upset about their acceptable, but admittedly less than satisfying, but still happy enough ending.

There are no love triangles, so triangle haters can safely watch this!

The OST is fantastic, so that did a lot to help me survive the first 14 episodes.

edit: I almost forgot! In other dramas I always hated the sad teary eyed `ge` or `gege` second lead characters. In this one teared eyed `ge` winning completely uncontested was a bit interesting & surreal :-)