Right now, I feel like one of the easiest ways to argue that Soriku is going to be intentionally canon sometime in the future is just to extrapolate off of a single question:
Why did they have Sora forget Riku's sacrifice?
That might seem a bit unrelated at first, but think about it. The whole point of Riku doing a True Love's Sacrifice(TM) is to tie into the themes that were found in most other Disney worlds in the game, right? And as proven most strongly by Anna, that kind of sacrifice is not inherently romantic. It can be any kind of love.
So let's assume, for the moment, that Sora and Riku are meant to remain completely platonic for the rest of the series. Riku's sacrifice absolutely still fits the thematic parallels, no problems here. And it's not like it doesn't make sense for Sora to repress a traumatic memory on principle.
But. Here's the thing about making your protagonist forget something. They kinda need to remember it later, and that remembrance needs to bring clarity to something. What revelation is Sora supposed to have, remembering that his best friend threw himself into the heart of a storm in a final attempt to save him?
Well, to start with, he would remember how much it hurt to watch. There could be something to be said here on how Sora cares so little for sacrificing himself, and hadn't been considering the effect that would have on his friends until experiencing it. But even if that's part of it, I hesitate to say that would be the point of it all, because like... that's not really the lesson the Disney worlds were trying to teach?
The whole point is to showcase just how strong the power of love is. Riku's moment is given so much importance, it's an earnest display of his devotion - to turn around and say that he shouldn't have done it because it was painful for Sora, or that Sora shouldn't have done something similar, is a little at odds with the scene itself. Obviously there's room to address multiple points at once, and even KH3 does this a little bit by having Xigbar taunt the heroes for how carelessly they drag each other into danger, but that cannot be the sole purpose of Sora remembering Riku's sacrifice. There has to be something else.
But what would that something else even be? If Sora's already at his ideal relationship status with Riku (best friends), then it's not like Riku's sacrifice is informing him of anything... new. He already knows the lengths Riku went to in DDD to save him. Yes, this was a certain step above, but if the revelation is just "whoa, Riku REALLY cares about me As a Friend," then, I dunno. I just feel like we could have fit that into KH3 itself? Because ultimately, not much would actually change between them if that was the case.
Instead, the game draws your attention to it just enough to make you notice when they start glossing over it later. But why? What could they possibly have to hide at this point?
Well, if that moment was tied to a revelation in Sora that Riku loved him in a different way than he thought, or vice versa, or both, then. Yeah, that would certainly be something we wouldn't have time to unpack in KH3.
And wouldn't you know it, it just so happens that this creates a convenient parallel with Sora's other missing chunk of memory: the events of CoM.
There are a lot of things that could stand out to Sora about that game, were he to remember it. (Watching Axel kill Vexen would certainly be, uh, one of them.) But I think we're all sleeping on the fact that Sora was absolutely in love with Namine. Like, he wasn't subtle. It was like his warm sentimentality about Kairi and feverish searching for Riku got all mixed together and created the ultimate person for him to be obsessed over.
So wouldn't it just be kinda fitting for both of his major lapses in memory to contain all of his clarity on romance? It's like, each time he gets close to understanding it, it's taken away from him. He had to forget Namine to remember everything else, while Riku is just too painful to think about. Whether by someone else's hand or his own, his mind is keeping this knowledge from him, limiting his emotional growth in the process.
Of course, there's also the fact that KH3 decided to bring up Sora's lack of understanding of romance at all, which they absolutely did not have to do, but is now a story thread that demands a resolution. And in the same game where he famously describes The Guy Who Looks Like Riku as "good-looking" and immediately gets teased by Donald about it (Japanese-only because the localizers don't want us to have nice things).
I just don't see what the point of all that is supposed to be, especially in conjunction with each other, if not "preparation for an eventual romance arc between Sora and Riku." And this is me skipping over a lot of stuff in order to hone in on a single point
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