I don't know how to carry this comparison over to the fantasy genre, but old sci-fi was also particularly bad about this for a very long while. You got contradictions like, "oh yeah, we live in this cool future space society but also women have their same gender roles because of something something natural hierarchy. I think it's a result of both the time that it was written and also that the overwhelmingly biggest demographic at the time (and probably still) was white young adults. Then along comes the New Wave era and authors start to explore societies not as they are, but how they ought to be. I'm not going to bat for all sci-fi here, but at least there's a specific event in its history that you can point to and see the genre's movement on issues of social justice. This is something that I think fantasy has never really grappled with, despite sharing demographics.

What I'm saying is that Star Trek is pretty much responsible for saving science-fiction from itself. I'm kind of joking, but it's hard to argue against the amount of impact it had in the genre because of its popularity. Fantasy hasn't done anything significant in that time besides Harry Potter and trying to rehash and sanitize Tolkien repeatedly. But I think that, despite itself, the fantasy genre as a whole is gonna be okay. Even D&D is trying to get away from the whole orcs=bad cliche.