It's crazy that the entire crew didn't notice Sanji's seemingly obvious weakness all the time they spent together. At the same time it took an old guy and someone who isn't even sure about his own sexual identity 1minute to figure it out.
So either the strawhats are just a shitty friends crew or the entire thing is basically a retcon.
Anyway I wish Sanji bros all the best. Oda needs to clean up his terrible mess with post TS Sanji.
The old guy in question has observation haki which canonically allows you to sense someone’s emotional state depending on the user (Rayleigh confirmed this) and Ivankov was with Sanji for 2 years
Keep in mind, the Strawhats have only actually been together
for a few months
All of the pre timeskip is over the course of a few months and the post timeskip has only had 2-3 months pass iirc. Every Strawhat has spent more time with their teachers than each other, funnily enough
The first part also isn’t entirely true. Luffy has challenged Sanji on this multiple times
That’s what the callback to Baratie in this chapter is for. It’s Luffy
literally telling him that he’s doing the opposite of what Zeff would want
Then in Sabaody he tells Sanji to run instead of unnecessarily throwing his life away against an enemy they clearly can’t defeat (against Kuma, where he doesn’t listen)