I kind of like that it wasn't some contrived misunderstanding, that drove them apart. Like, instead of having some limp reveal where it turns out Tachibana was calling the other girls pathetic, not Ebi, and she said they weren't friends because she just thought it would make Ebi uncomfortable to be put on the spot like that after two years of not talking. It would have been easy to idealise the real Tachibana, to make her return more simple and sparkly, but presenting her as a flawed and weak person made her more interesting, and more complicated than you'd expect a character who's absent for all but two chapters to be.
That said, it's still kind of weird how the "main story" takes place entirely within the first and last couple of chapters. The rest of the manga feels like another thing entirely. As if Hakameda Mera interrupted a sombre oneshot about estranged friends and death and aliens with a sixteen chapter spin-off about their time in design school, and they don't really connect to each other. Getting distracted by the B plot and rushing the A plot is something of a habit for this author, it seems.
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