I don’t think people believed Shelob was going to be a super sexified objectifed woman and were complaining for that, but still, you have to admit it’s pretty eyerolling to take a giant spider, and transform it in a… let’s say beautiful lady in the game. I think it was done by the lack of named enemies in the lore. You have Sauron, and uh… that’s it? The only powerful enemy that is found in the books and also could speak was in fact, Shelob.
In any case, nor Shelob transformation nor lootboxes have affected the game. It’s a total success with 400K copies sold only on PC.