I hear this sort of thing in the Les Mis fandom from people who are inordinately impressed that Victor Hugo compared a pair of characters to multiple historic gay-ish couples and used the word "loved" to describe how one male character felt about another, as if this was the peak of representation in 1865 and he couldn't possibly have done anything more. But then more historically-minded fans point out that actually, there were other examples of literature at the time that were explicitly queer, they're just not as widely known.

So I guess that while I do want the next generation of queer kids to know their history, I also don't want them to get the impression that there wasn't any explicitly queer stuff in history and all we have is subtext. There weren't very many queer YA books in the 90s, but they did exist!

I think you have a good point about CoM/TCO/TCR being What People Say They Want. Unfortunately, What People Say They Want and what they're actually willing to invest time and emotional energy in are often not the same...