My immediate thought was Harry Harlow's wire mother/rag mother experiments with Rhesus Monkeys (CW: live animal experimentation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies) which were an early exerpiment showing that it's really, really bad for primates to be socially isolated. A bunch of polar expeditions were demonstrating the same thing about a decade prior.
Recently we've had a whole bunch of movies about men failing the Turing Test regarding their digital waifus - Blade Runner, Her, Ex Machina, Archer. There are like five different TvTropes pages directly related to this question. And you can go back all the way to Hellenic Greece, with the story of Pygmalia and Galatea, to get the OG "Incel falls in love with body pillow" narrative.
Yeah I didn't 100% agree with Shaun's take but I did think it provided some valid insight. Like I said I don't think it's all about right and wrong, I think it's partly trying to challenge the viewer's (presumed) initial acceptance of the whole situation, and partially just trying to tell a tragic story with inspiration from classical tragedies. I wouldn't call Shaun's take wrong, but I don't think it should be treated as definitive either, the movie is more complex than that.