Was this chapter even needed at all? Seemed like a weird forced moment.
That's kind of the point. MC forced a crisis event for a character that happened WAY earlier than it was supposed to in the overall story. He had to fix it. That's the problem with "I go into a story and be a part of it" is that you change things. Like... what if you go into a Persona game? If the characters don't go through their traumas, if they don't have their hardships, they can't grow, and therefore, their Persona's can't grow, leaving them weak, where they will get stomped on by the final boss as a result. That's the issue. The story is crafted that everyone has to go through their hardships so they can be fixed and therefore grow as a character for the reader/player to see. That's also kinda why Persona characters are so popular - you see their trauma, you see their hardships, and they overcome them, accepting their own flaws. It's the ones who can't accept said flaws and blame others that become antagonists.
That's the tricky thing about these kinds of stories. If you do as you please and interfere with the natural order of things, you might cause irreparable damage. MC is going for the losing heroine to make her happy, but his actions still caused something to happen to another person, forcing their crisis event. Thankfully he knew what to say to her. But now that she had her crisis event out of the way, she might do something else. You get it?