Now we're a few years down the road from the initial 'scandal, I'd say it's pretty clear that yeah, it wasn't a problem, and the whole controversy was just the early power grabs by the extreme left using everyone's fear of being called sexist, to work their way into positions of authority to further push their hateful beliefs onto people.
Everyone normal likes to appear attractive. In zany fantasy media, that sexiness can be dialled up to a ridiculous and unrealistic extreme, and doesn't make the world any less 'believable'.
If you think that turns a character into an object, that the very fact of a woman being attractive to males lessens them, then I'd say that's pretty obviously a problem you have, and need to get over.
Because these hateful, frankly misogynist standards for how women can be allowed to be portrayed have been the norm for a couple of years now, and it's ended up with ugly, masculine in body and character female characters, that are always angry, always confrontational, always in positions of power, always domineering, and quite honestly more shallow and less realistic, than the previously often well written women in games and fiction, that were attractive and were depicted as such.
Quite honestly, the old fanservice warrior women, wearing a bikini to battle, are a damned sight more representative of most actual women than the current woke, ugly, cardboard cut out 'strong female characters'.