My apologies, but I keep taking issue with the implication, that VNs or Otome targeted at women are somehow by definition less prone to problematic content than the stuff targeted at a male audience.
That's just not true.
There's straight up 0 Otome I can name of the top of my head where the female protagonist doesn't get abducted/kidnapped/incarcerated/knocked unconscious at one point. The only ones I can think of are the Tokimemo Girl's Side games and maybe Girlish Love Revolution, and those were never even localized.
And then those also have stupid shit in them like the headmaster that stalks you and invites you to a date by the pool (you're a student), the crossdressing fashionista friend, "practicing" the groping mini game with your underage neighbor... Girlish Love Revolution is about losing weight to get a boyfriend, and is problematic on a whole other level.
Nearly every Otome I played has a route where you can date the serial killer/a psychopath that straight up drugs you to never leave him/a minor/your teacher/someone in a family-like relation to you.
All of these are problematic relationship power settings, and in nearly none of the cases they were handled well (the one case I'd fight for is dating your maths teacher in, again, Tokimemo GS 1).
Even good/cute stuff like Hakouki or Code:Realize works with physical pain as a metaphor of the pains of love that your husbando would take upon him to be with you. There's gorey stuff to illustrate devotion. It's not a healthy view of relationships, and it's understandable it turns some people off of the whole thing.
This is, of course, because these are illustrating fantasies, fetishes, dreamlike dramas - not everyone playing these scenarios will imitate that in life, but a lot of these stories are turning really bad, harmful relationships into something to fantasize about.
There's pornographic content and pedophilic depictions in Otome just as they are in male-targeting romance sims. Interesting enough, there's a whole subgenre of Otome with male gay pornographic depictions to appeal to heterosexual young girls that would be too shy to watch actual heterosexual sexual acts, but still like to fantasize about the male body and male devotion.
Otome are also problematic. The fact that they appeal to women doesn't make them exempt from criticism or the bad reputation that they earned for themselves.
Again, funnily enough, I have yet to see if anything like that shows up in the KFC-game - which at least has the advantage to overplay the whole thing as a big joke or parody of the usual shit, similarly how the partridge ends up killing you in Hatoful Boyfriend if you try to romance it.
And then you bring up the fact that the depictions of carefree underage girls are often not even in VNs or dating sims, and often come from games that target women as a main demographic.
And I agree with you, but does it really make it better that the game is played mostly be women if you still get illustrations like this: