A long while back I was arguing which main protagonist cares about their feiends the LEAST since Yugioh is so heavy about friendship. I argued Judai but then re-watched this episode and was…
Even with how he reacted to his friends in seasons two and three, I still don’t think that he didn’t care about his friends. At least, I didn’t see it in that way exactly. He cared about them, but he was too laid back for his own good. He was too assured that things would work out since prior to season three, they did without any serious long lasting negative consequences for him or his friends. In season three, he was also too narrow minded in his focus to rescue Johan on top of that, so he never even considered the possibility of things going horribly wrong as they did.
I don’t think that this necessarily means that he cared about his friends the least amount compared to the other protagonists. If he didn’t care about them so much, then their deaths during the Dark World arc wouldn’t have hit him as hard as they did. I think it was more like he wasn’t always the best friend to them not because he didn’t care about them enough, but because he didn’t really know how to deal with such serious situations until after season three.