There are several other bits in the Wilder books that are cringey too: some of them in still-in-use stereotype ways (the aged Indian who warns at the beginning of the Hard Winter -- he's Wise!!) and some of them in ways that have become glaring even to child-readers (the blackface episode in... one of the DeSmet books, I forget which). On the one hand, I remember being a child-reader and being like, "Geeze, Ma, way to be an ungracious host." And on the other hand, and coming from a region very distant from the prairie, the history I learned from this book -- and we all "learn" history from novels; mostly, we learn what aspects of history our culture thinks is important -- I say, the history I learned from this book was all about the poor geographically challenged white settlers, and not at all about the "Dude, literally, get offa my lawn."

I would say that part of criticizing the book/series is criticizing its role as a "canonical" work of children's literature. Works fall out of the canon all the time, sometimes quietly and sometimes after nasty fights and sometimes it's just a matter of a story becoming obvously old, obviously not reflective of who we are or who we want to be now.

One of the things I think about a lot is, how would you rewrite your "childhood beloved classics" if you could, to rehabilitate them for today? I've seen several de-racialized versions of Little Black Sambo, of varying levels of success. Someone was looking into an update of Hitty, Her First Hundred Years after the same fashion.