History is messy. I think people discovery the regime history - in which "our" opponents were pure evil cartoon villains - is ridiculous and unsupported. Then the temptation becomes to reverse the framing, to say maybe the cartoon villain was a cartoon hero.

Villain X was probably not pure evil. Villain X probably had motivations that made sense to him & were even intelligible to others at the time.

That said it's also entirely possible that Villain X did bad things despite being human. I find the reversal into heroism often misleading, and the challenge is to break out of the regime framing entirely.