Lego actually is a stronger precedent for ‘yellow is what color you make a person when you don’t mean to identify race’. Once they started adding movie character minifigs they introduced white skin as well.

But the journey there also gives the lie to ‘yellow minifigs we’re never coded white’. The very first Star Wars Lego sets shipped with yellow minifigs for characters like Luke, Leia and Han. It was only once they started to think about shipping characters like Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu that they realized ‘wait a minute, we’re never going to get away with a yellow Lando’.

(And actually around the same time they were also dealing with releasing NBA player minifigs.. the decisionmaking at Lego must have been pretty complicated at the time)