Shadow's dope man, and sadly one of the bigger mishandles in recent years. It's really jarring seeing him become a "lol friendship is for pussies" guy when he DOES care about his allies, just not in the openly cheesy way. Also all the meme-y edgelord shit, he DOES have his own game btw but it's truly awful and left a permanent bad mark on him. The infamous Sonic 06 afterwards redeems him but since that game is also a disaster for other reasons, people dismiss it.
It's really complicated because Sega makes the most bizarre decisions on how they want things to go, even outside of games they're irrational (comics, toys, etc).
Also.... Sonic.exe is the least of the fandom's problems. There's no denying it's super infamously weird, I don't even have an explanation for it, but truthfully you'd see such things in other fandoms and I don't... have a problem with it, satire or genuine. I honestly don't care if people make OCs, Christian art, fetish art, gore, whatever, it's not hurting people and I simply see it as people expressing themselves and having passion for their interests. I might not LIKE or even understand such things, but yeah.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ no clue what else to say about that.