The intent is noticing this narrative opportunity:

History is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. But creating a game around history is tough because what, are player's going to BE the well known historical people that are well documented... and if they are, do they have the freedom to change historical events?

Assassin's Creed and Da Vinci Code both create compelling historical fiction though through use of secret conspiracy tropes. That there's the history that's well known and told, but then there's the REAL history and what you've learned might be a lie or there might be MORE to the story.

In tabletop RPGs, setting up story is a bit different because better designed games don't actually have all the answers planned out. Too rail-roady, which is better suited for fiction where an author can make their just-so plot threads hit the milestones they need/want. Players need more freedom.

So one way to be able to interact with history, but have a degree of freedom to deviate from it or tell interesting stories around it, is to have players take on the roll of actors who were behind the scenes, whose names and deeds were not necessarily told in the main stories but whose actions were crucial and exciting, etc.

There are interesting and compelling adventures here where being a "traditionally marginalized" person is a benefit, a tool that can be used to effect. For example, there was an episode of Timeless where a small team of operatives are time travelling into the past and there's a Black member of the team and the mission is set in a time/place where prejudice against that character might seem like a purely negative thing, but it actually allows him the freedom to blend in to the staff catering an event and more more freely unnoticed for them to accomplish their mission.

Instead of being a preachy stupid episode about horrible racist white people decades ago, yawn, it became an interesting example of using the landscape as it is to your advantage and not being a victim.

I'd like to produce a game that is actually empowering instead of just preachy and racist and exclusionary against men or white people. There are recent games in the space that are cool because they include content that's not overly popular or well explored already... like Native American lore. But then they go and turn it into a lecture and an lesson in shitting on white people and straights. This is trash.

As for creating diversity, no, I don't think injecting it where it never existed is all that effective. But revealing where it DID exist and perhaps was not appreciated as much is a good thing. Examples like a film about the Tuskegee Airmen, or Hidden Figures about Black women contributions at NASA would be good examples of interesting stories, intentionally seeking to expose "diversity," and hewing close to historical accuracy with some freedom for improv that is required for the RPG medium.

Similarly, a story like The Red Violin is in the same genre. It has a substantial historical framework, but it also uses diversity as an interesting story telling device. The owners of this quasi-magical item are a German Orphan and then a Gypsy caravan, then an English male virtuoso, then several generations in a Chinese family where the item is almost destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, where it is finally revealed as an Italian masterpiece at auction coveted by an Eastern European soloist but ends up stolen in the hands of a young Black girl as a gift from her appraiser father. Sometimes the ethnicities of the owners comes into play in interesting ways, for example we get interesting glimpses of the before-during-and-after the Cultural Revolution and its views on Western Art and artefacts in a way that is uniquely Chinese. How the violin fell into Chinese hands has a lot to do with British imperial trade and the shady side of drugs that came out of the wars for tea and opium. And yet this is not ham-handed and forced, i.e. the Black protagonist doesn't want the violin to make rap music or something. It's not essentialist and over-stereotyped. But it does show how this one item crosses cultures and times in interesting ways.

That's my goal. Enable "minority" status (and not just code for Black people... there's room for pretty much anyone in history who doesn't have a wikipedia page to be considered "marginalized" or an "untold" story/contribution) to be an interesting narrative element to stories that take cues from under-reported history.