I never really understood the hate against shota until I worked on a onee-shota manga myself. The amount of people calling it pedophilia and gay rape enabling (sic) was kind of astounding. At least I figured why games like genshin don't have playable shota characters I guess.
Like why would you even think that the target audience of a onee-shota manga where the big tiddy onee-chan is the one sexualized is pedo enabling? It just doesn't make sense to me. I genuinely think there must be something wrong with these people. Though the worst ones are on reddit of course, so most likely there is something severely wrong with them.
Let's add more context.
The need for the term "Straight shota" is because a lot of shota content(If I go on hitomi.la or other sites, about 1/5 shota comics makes the shotas look very cute and plappable by virtue of containing yaoi)
And a non insignificant amount of BL is shota.
The entire term was coined in a magazine question asked by a female reader what a reverse of a lolicon would be called. (a woman who likes young boys).
There's lots of uh gay shotacon content, and the occasional oneshota content that puts emphasis on the shotas.
https://mangadex.org/title/fb05cf26-e94e-403d-95c7-706a97e700dd/boku-tachi-wa-onee-chan-no-toriko.
For example, any shota content rifuru makes also emphasizes the cutness of the shota(s).
More devil's advocate arguments would include eg people doing some conflating it to real life (eg wishing it was them or something due to self insert fuckery) and thinking an IRL victim is "lucky" because they are a boy and the perpetrator was a hot older woman and the normalization of certain relationships.
The research around it is all murky so there's no definite proof linking shota/loli with pedophilia.