The shipping origins of many fandoms, at least as best as I can tell, is because so many things were refusing to give romantic relationships to people who definitely could have had them. Now that it's not quite so stigmatized, in some places, for both caring and/or romantic relationships to be present without being either the focus or a distraction from the story, there's additional space for having platonic relationships and not having everything have to end up in shipping. I like it, because it widens the amount of stories that we can tell.