It should be noted that this was also the first race mixed couple in Pokemon, since she has a white husband. She was also the first legit girlboss in the franchise, as for the short time you meet her the game establishes that she wears the pants(or the apron) in the family.
Yeah, Gamefreak was really confused as to what the Westerners really wanted and you can tell they didn't really know what they were doing. They still don't, you can tell that they don't have the heart in following the new ESG guidelines and making everyone look ugly, they're just doing it because their superiors are telling them this is what Americans want. Nilantic have recently pozzed up Pokemon GO, but since they're from San Francisco this sort of thing is more natural to them.
For better or for worse, Gen 5 was the last time that Gamefreak put any sort of soul into the franchise. Gen 6 had that too to a degree, you could tell they had grand plans for their first 3D entry, but they tried backpedaling way too hard after the Gen 5 controversy by pandering to Kanto fans and their tech was simply not up to snuff. They couldn't do everything they wanted, awful performance during normal play and especially triple battles is the best example of their lack of optimization.
Gen 7 was a special case, I think it worked but you could tell that a different approach was taken. The good, and the bad, came from that new approach as you could still see the same atrophy that set in during Gen 6 if you looked deep enough. As of Gen 8, and now Gen 9, the decay is unquestionable. I wish Pokemon would go back to stupid controversies like this one with Lenora, rather than the likes of Dexit or the 70$ DLCs or the recent ugly trainers and DEI. At least back then, Gamefreak genuinely wanted to make a better product, even if they did stupid shit to get there, these days they can't even pretend to care.