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WARNING: Spoilers for Pygmalion/My Fair Lady below, I highly recommend watching the whole thing, it's worth your time (99%+ confidence); Pygmalion is freely available here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tmdPj_XbF30 , My Fair Lady can be found without much difficuly on the high seas.
Really? Bearnard Shaw quite convincingly argued the opposite, at least to me, in the afterward he wrote to his play: https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/pygmalion/sequel-what-happened-afterwards/ , the whole thing is very worth reading, but it's the ending which clinches it for me (bolding mine):
Eliza is deeply interested in Higgins, but this is not a romantic interest, it is the sort of interest one has towards one's heroes or even one's Gods. Making her come back grovelling to Higgins just demeans the person she is now, and by extension demeans Higgins crafting ability since he created what Eliza is at the end of the story.
Even ignoring all that making Eliza and Higgins get together just ruins My Fair Lady completely for me. It's not believable; not just from Eliza's end but also Higgin's end. Higgins isn't sexually interested in Eliza, he is interested in Eliza in the same way that any elevated man is interested in true friendship, which as a thing is far rarer and more worthy than true love, indeed as La Rochefoucauld said hundreds of year before Shaw: "However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship".
Even then, why would Higgins want to marry Eliza and have her dedicate her time to domestic duties, he has Mrs. Pearce for that and his station in life (and the time) is such that even if he wanted himself a wife he could easily get himself a far more docile and beautiful woman gladly willing to wed him who he could boss around much easier. In Eliza Higgins created an equal, someone worthy of going toe to toe with himself; you would not cage your fellow man would you, why should Higgins want to cage Eliza?
Higgins doesn't want Eliza to leave him for the same reason that Michaelangelo would be very sad and unhappy if his David suddenly disappeared, throwing in a latent romantic (and by extension sexual) motive to his actions demeans the man himself.
Much like how the chapters on Scouring of the Shire are an integral part to what LoTR is, the ending to Pygmalion is a fundamental part of the whole that you can't just straight up and replace while keeping the work the same thing (and not depicting the scouring was my principal complaint with the Peter Jackson films).
Pygmailion had to be made sacharrine to be palatable to the common man and that didn't just involve the songs thrown in (which I admit are good, Bernard Shaw would probably be rolling around in his grave if he found out though) but it is the change to the end which completely ruins it all, turining it from incisive social commentary and haute drama into a mere romcom, something you take a girl to see on your second date with her.
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