You’re right about this, though some complaints were made by some people, in general they weren’t viewed anything like the female inserts today. Partly, that’s because those characters were all introduced in a world where they operated as exceptions to the general gender dynamic of men constituting the bulk of militaries and leadership in war (mirroring the normal gender dynamic of war).
Those characters weren’t viewed as efforts to re-write the rule, but simply as exceptions to it. Tyrande’s a slightly special case in that the “exception” she was part of was a broader racial exception. The same way that the Amazons of Greek mythology were exceptions to the general way the rest of the Greek mythological world operated.
Today, people don’t view inserted female leads as the writers creating exceptional characters that break the rule. Instead, they are (I would say correctly) perceived as efforts by the writers to re-write the rule itself.