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Notes -
I get the sense that this is something that's beyond the grasp of so many writers and self-described media-literate critics, particularly in the mainstream in the past decade or so. They seem to perceive everything at surface level, that a character is relatable if they share all the surface-level characteristics of the viewer, who they imagine to be some version of themselves. So they have the right skin colors, ages, sexualities, and political beliefs, but the characters themselves are flat and uninteresting.
Because what viewers relate to aren't such surface-level characteristics. And it's not even the so-called shared experiences of people who suffer due to sharing these surface-level characteristics that idpol likes to push as a real thing that exists so much; even these things are ultimately surface-level. To build a relatable character requires giving them something underneath all that that the viewer can connect with, something deeper and more personal than just having the right skin color and fighting for the right causes. And once you have that, the surface-level stuff largely don't matter, hence why something like a Puritanical colonial New England family in The Vvitch can be relatable to a modern person.
I imagine this is a predictable consequence of being taught that race/sex/etc.-essentialism was not only correct, but that it was the only correct and just way of looking at other humans all throughout their schooling. When your time and energy is spent focused on these surface-level features, then that doesn't leave much room to focus on the stuff underneath that actually matters. Writers write what they know, after all.
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