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Going to come back to this to reflect in more detail to your original post and to this comment, but wanted to quickly float the idea that perhaps these people view you as particularly sound, so when they lay things on you or are just more emotional or intense in front of you, and you seem unphased - neither rushing to condemn them nor scrambling to reassure - they interpret that as disapproval from someone whom they find sound. And that because they value your judgement & integrity, they get sheepish and awkward in the absence of a strong outward reaction, which in turn you interpret as them thinking ill of you.

Only suggesting this because have seen quite a bit of this between people, and experienced mild versions of both ends of that dynamic.

Not that it helps, if it even resonates, or provides guidance.

If you’re being perceived a different way than you intend, I find it’s best to simply apologise, explain that what your intention was and clarify what you mean.

It’s not just you that can mistakenly imply, others can mistakenly infer things too; such is the nature of human to human communication. (Considering we’re just a mess of electrical impluses it’s a miracle we can communicate ideas at all tbh)

Just be yourself, apologise and clarify if it comes across incorrectly, learn from the immediate feedback and I feel critically; don’t be trying to keep to guidelines of how you need to behave in a conversation. Be yourself, be in the moment. If you’re trying to micromanage your behaviour in the moment, people will sense that and it’ll put them off.

Just try to lean towards replies that hear the other person and show them kindness, but don’t overthink it on a day to day

Idk about all the rest of it, but you might be able to learn to watch your tone. You know, modulate your voice better. Figure out what sounds aggressive and how to catch it, maybe apologize for it if appropriate, then consciously avoid it for a bit.

I think I've had a couple friends like you, and while there were a few things to tolerate with them (as I'm sure there were with me as well), the weirdly/slightly aggressive tone they had a bit too often made hanging out with them a little bit worse than it could've been.

Still happy to have spent the time I did with them. I'm still hanging out with one of them and he's still aggressively into some games, TFT now, but he's chilled out a bit it seems or I just notice it less. It comes back when he gets competitive or drunk.

All of these examples across your comments have this in common: People who were feeling guilty about something, and then lashing out at you in anger for allegedly calling them out on the issue. This is a very common coping strategy that people use, and it's really not your fault at all because they didn't tell you up front about their feelings. They just want to make it seem that it is your fault to deflect from their own unpleasant feelings.

This is a really hard one to learn to detect if you're not tuned into people (that is, autistic). Hell, it's a hard one to detect for everybody. You kind of have to watch for body language which indicates discomfort: Body stiffness, blank affect, disengaging from conversation, flared nostrils, clipped syllables, curt replies. If you see those indicators, change the topic.

One possibility is that it's how you phrase things? Everything seems fine here but people tend to write and speak differently, so just throwing out a possibility here.

I used to say essentially "not my fault" a lot as a kid (it was a kind of deflection that I resorted to instead of actually dealing with stuff), and my mom called me out on it once, which caused a huge shift in how i thought about communication from then on. See, sometimes it was my fault, and other times it wasn't, but that doesn't really matter a lot in a conversation, so I started kinda taking a mental step back to consider what I was about to say would actually accomplish in the conversation, or how it might be perceived by others, and it became clear to me that I had some other bad conversational habits as well that escalated situations when they didn't need to.

It might not be easy to detect all of them at once, but just getting into the mindset of thinking about this stuff might help. Hopefully this technique isn't why I'm anxious these days :P

Edit: Also some subjects are sore as you experienced with your unemployed friend, so having this habit of taking a step back might have helped with realizing that in advance. It's not always doable of course, you can't know everything.