It's notable, I think, that a lot of white people (me included) didn't/don't even pick up on the color of the characters in Earthsea. But the descriptions are there, black on white. Le Guin herself wrote about that after the TV-series:
> I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don’t notice, don’t care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being “colorblind.” Nobody else does.
But that also speaks to the fact that didn't write stereotypical black characters, or stereotypical women. She just wrote people that happened to be black, or women, and sometimes the color of their skin or gender is just casually mentioned well into the story. Only when it is essential to the plot (like in Left Hand of Darkness) will she make an point of it.
She's more of a talking point in some time because she cared about minority representation and gender in sci fi before it was cool (though interestingly by her own admission she took too long to address gender).
Her Earthsea books were noteworthy both because she explicitly made the protagonists and most of the Earthsea archipelago inhabitants explicitly non-white, except for the barbaric Kargs, as well as for her repeated run-ins with publishers who tried to make Ged in particular white (on covers and the like), and thereby demonstrated exactly why it mattered that he is not.
So she is not lionized for her gender. She has gotten renewed attention because she spent decades of her career championing these issues at a point where most other authors in her niches didn't even acknowledge there was an issue, and the rest of the world is finally catching up.
Even for people who do not like her niches, she is worth reading exactly because of how she dealt with issues of race and gender and sexuality. You can read her books without caring about them as a political act, and you'll still come away with a different view of the world than what you'll get elsewere. Look at how much fantasy still to this day presents the protagonists as all white, and "exotic characters from foreign lands" and antagonists as being far more likely to be dark skinned, to see why. Then watch the 2003 TV adaptation of Earthsea and see how even knowing this, the studio made it mostly a whitewash (and read her justifiably annoyed reaction) - to anyone who thinks this does not matter, I would say that if it did not matter then surely it wouldn't have mattered to follow her descriptions either.
Or read Left Hand of Darkness in light of modern discussions of gender and consider it was written in 1969.
She was ahead of the game when she started doing this, and rather depressingly she is still ahead of the game now, many decades later, and a year after her death.