The article presents a lot of evidence for this othering, but I still think back to my own aversion to the genre at the time. To this day, I still don't play a ton of JRPGs, but I played Chrono Trigger back in the day, and I'm finding some fun in the old-school FF7 for the first time lately. If I were to attribute reasons to the general distaste for JRPGs in the 6th gen, it would be a couple of different things:

• a wide gap in production value between the average non-Final-Fantasy JRPG and the average action game (even Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts would flip flop between several different levels of production value, and that's a problem I still have with games today like Yakuza and Street Fighter 6's world tour mode)
• tedium with random battles AKA trash mobs, that drag out a game too long
• difficulty understanding what makes this JRPG different from the last couple JRPGs

And while I'm sure that 20 years ago we absolutely had trouble in the west accepting Japan's fashion and gender norms, charitably, the best I can say from my own recollection is that those protagonists were frequently just very unrelatable and/or uninteresting. You can call it something like an obsession with masculinity, but people think Dante is cool and want to be him, which makes it fun to live out that fantasy of virtually being cool like Dante, but no one really wants to be Tidus.