So there's a lot that's been said about the drow relating to this, and there's plenty of discussion that's been had and is still being had to this day, but to not derail into all that, one thing I will point out is that all the baggage comes from D&D itself, Larian didn't originate it. They're just running with the established lore of the setting they were given. I'll knock Larian on plenty of things, but I don't think this is a fair one to lay at their feat.
D&D itself has turned away from depictions of entire races as innately evil, especially when it comes to races explicitly labelled as "dark" parallels to those traditionally prominent among good-aligned characters and player characters. Larian had every opportunity to do the same, but instead relished in depicting all "dark" and foreign races as evil and backward, the race of oppressed peoples as criminals and leeches who deserve the scorn they receive, and fixating almost entirely on humans and elves among party and NPC representation as a parallel to white people.
We know blackface is racist nowadays. We wouldn't tolerate blackface in a video game with the excuse that blackface used to be acceptable. Larian wrote a game in which dark-skinned people are consistently either evil or associated with evil. A dark-skinned woman is the evil counterpart to a good-aligned white male character. The black spellcaster party member is someone who associated with devils to get his powers the lazy way, as opposed to the white spellcaster who wooed a goddess with his talent for magic. The two white-skinned characters returning from previous games are potential party members; the two dark-skinned characters returning from previous games are one-note villains.
They're never going to give any sort of significant romance content to Minthara, because they fundamentally do not see Minthara as being akin to a person they would have any respect for in a relationship. She is a sex object from a culture of sluts. That other people created the original drow culture based on racist ideology does not make Larian embracing said racist ideology acceptable.
