All your examples are cartoons for children, which Knights of Guinevere isn't. It's meant to be a show for teenagers and adults, there's blood and guts and smoking and shit.
The reason why my examples were kids' cartoons is because
1. like it or not, children are still the perceived audience for animation here in the west.
2. what you consume as a child shapes your adult mindset.
Also just because a piece of animation has blood/guts/etc. doesn't necessarily make it "adult". What do I mean by "adult"? I mean actually tackling its topics in a mature way that reflects how a normal emotionally mature ADULT sees the world. Shows like Knights of Guinevere, the Hellaverse duo (Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss), etc. are not adult animation. They're kids shows with adult elements shoddily glued onto them.
And even in the "inspiring" and "aspirational" shows from the past there are fuck ugly characters and oblique story telling.
Courage being the best example
Here's the thing: even though he's ugly, the hunchback is a very kind, gentle, affectionate person. He also sticks up for people weaker than he is. If the episode were written nowadays, he would probably be rewritten to be a snowflake who just wants to be loooooved with no redeemable traits whatsoever.
Same with My life as a teenage Robot, Sheldon is a very flawed, unattractive character but is in the main cast and has episodes centered around him.
Sheldon is quite flawed, yes, but he GROWS PAST THOSE FLAWS. He mellows out of stalking Jenny in later episodes, manages to sneak past the Wakemans' security system, helps Nora board a Cluster warship, lives as a space pirate (eventually a captain)
for decades, and even becomes a secret agent. All of this leads to Jenny, Brad, and Tucker actually becoming very close friends to him and even improving his social status with the other kids a bit.
Disney themselves have even had ugly and unconventional heroes
Again - sacrifice, even risking death to do so for those in need. Which brings me to:
It sounds to me like you're saying good guys should be attractive and bad guys should be ugly, which is a very shallow way of thinking.
absolutely not what I said at all. Characters used to grow as people or show admirable traits over the course of their journey, even though they went through some pretty tough shit to get there. Characters today don't have struggles, they don't go through any meaningful growth, everything is resolved for them because they're so gosh-darn diverse and perfect.
