Bashir and chief O’Brien have also a deep friendship and no one has ever claimed they were in a romantic relationship. Or Picard and Riker. Or Geordi and Data. They have close and meaningful friendships and no one else sees more than that. Sure, there are fanfics, but it’s not something really accepted as fact by many in the fandom, as opposed to Bashir and Garak. The dynamics between Bashir and Garak really feel like flirting, specially in the first one or two seasons. And nothing really makes me think Andy Robinson is lying when he says he really intended to portray Garak like that.
There are also pretty decent writings explaining why the relationship between Frodo and Sam reads as homosexual, like this one. I mean, even when I read the book around a decade before the movies were released, I remember talking about it on IRC and people who had read it earlier were making constant jokes about how gay frodo and sam are. Even people who refuse to have queer content in their fiction saw them as queer.
Can’t talk about Captain America and Bucky because I know very little of the source material and didn’t enjoy these movies enough to care about any character and considered they made little sense, even heterosexual romance is pretty badly done in the MCU in my opinion.
Btw, the same thing you are complaining about could be said about male-female relationships, whenever there is a close friendship between a male and a female characters, a relationship is expected, and sometimes even forced between characters who had none in the source material when adapting it (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or the Hobbit for example). And we have tons of examples of forced heterosexual romances with far less chemistry than Bashir and Garak that harm their respective movies and shows (don’t get me started on Rey/Kylo Ren, Padme/Anakin, or Spock/Uhura in the Abrams movies, or the dumpster fire that is Passengers).
Complaining about a bunch of people just being happy with the few crumbles of non harmful queer subtext we could have in the 90s feels a bit petty.