You don't have to be making date streams or whispering pillow talk ASMRs to be considered GFE. I don't think people ever called her that really as I don't think anyone in NijiEN is, but she also isn't like Nina or Reimu spamming male collabs either and in fact only seldom had done it. She was for most of this time, seen more as that weird girl who's friends with Millie, not a tryhard anti-unicorn type. She often would talk about her "roomie" who she said is a girl etc as well so some people had gone in more than halfway thinking she's more like a femcel or bi or something.
She also sings well and has done a number of songs (beautiful singing naturally causes people to gosling etc, and for her since it's so uncharacteristic with her normal voice/personality there's a gap moe element to it) and has done a lot of cute cooking streams too. She doesn't scream tryhard GFE, but her general demeanor makes (or rather, made) people find her cute and her just being snarky didn't really diminish people liking her like that, at least not up until this Kyo thing got turned up to 11.
NijiENs act like being parasocial is worse than being a rapist murderer superhitler but that's an objectively ignorant take because vtubing by its nature is parasocial as all fucking hell compared to even regular streaming, which is also parasocial FYI. "Parasocial" as a term isn't actually a ronery sex thing, normalfags feel it all the time for politicians, athletes, actors/actresses and so on, it is literally just your valueing someone you see on a screen in at least some fashion akin to how you value actual people in your life. And when you see a girl talking to (you) as in chat as a collective entity for hours and hours every day, this short-circuits our brains to treat her like she's there in our lives. If it's a cute girl making cupcakes on stream for "you" in a sense what do you THINK is going to happen? Why did she THINK NijiEN hired her or any of them for? God damn their collective idiocy is just astounding. As for EN management it seems to just be completely absent (besides to fire Yugo) because that's generally how Niji is to begin with. So they as a group have developed this local work culture with their own unproven superstitions/narratives that they tell themselves about us and convince themselves is true.