Let's not do revisionist history, Solm was mostly white people, the goofball black royal family with le silly eyes, and black npcs. Having a token black county that was treated in universe with less respect than the white countries wasn't a triumph of melanin, it was Engage ticking off a biome checklist.
Solm is on all accounts a better "representation" than Regna Ferox - the country that has no black NPCs besides the Khans (who become playable later) and Plegia were the only dark-skinned (ash skinned) characters are evil or enemies, save for Aversa who is woman (tm) thus was brainwashed to be evil.
Ferox is, according the FE13 itself (iirc?) a country made up of barbarians who elect their "Khan" based on strength, because of course barbarian people go in fightpits to determine who's the strongest - but watch out, they don't duke it out themselves, they send people to do it - and Basilio gets fodderized by Walmart, with only a plot ex machina making him able to survive to give the middle finger to Validar.
They're basically worffed (?) to make Walmart and Valm the new main threat, so even if the game spends less time in Solm than in the other countries, they're not flattened to make someone look better/stronger in comparison.
They value "strength and honesty", yeah :/
And the "desert biome" was checked in FE13 through Plegia, and as I said, it has Validar being the only "coloured" person in the Grimleal, NPCs and the main recruitable cast being as white as possible, Gangrel and Aversa (iirc?) only being recruitable in the Spotpass/not main game content.
Add the "desert people aren't wearing a lot of clothes because it's hot" when Solm characters and NPC dropped this nonsense and, yeah.
For sure it isn't the best representation one can expect in 2026 (well, 2023) but compared to what came before? It's comparing FE4's Julia to FE10's Elincia.
