Dang, so she moved the goalposts after all. But he did give her his answer, ...a year and a half later. I guess he did grow enough of a spine to do that. So they kinda wasted 1.5 years mutually being in love but holding back and doing nothing about it, even graduation from high school happened before they started dating. Wonder what Rika thought about that (she probably thought they were FWB for like ~2 years before they began dating? They never resolved her misunderstanding after all).
We end with a return confession and a kiss. Par for the course, and the bare minimum of what I'd consider acceptable for a romcom; well, it's a happy ending at least. Standard romcom confession ending when they start dating, continuing the long-running trend of having the bare minimum rom and leaving the com to do the heavy lifting.
On a side note, Aina got a serialized manga without needing to do a pilot oneshot. Think about that. The publisher must be pretty confident about her for that to happen. Also we never saw Minami again after Aina subbed her out for assistant work... and finally, we never even got Mie's full name. Confessions and a kiss, but to my memory he was never even fully introduced.