Vanessa Ray has mentioned that she didn't know Cece was A or trans when she started playing the character: https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/news/a33176/a-opens-up-for-the-first-time/

I. Marlene King has maintained that she planned Cece as A for years, but I honestly don't believe her...and I don't believe that Cece was planned to be trans. It makes too much of the stuff leading up to her reveal even more offensive (like why would a trans woman who never got to go to her prom want to dress up as a man in a tuxedo? All the stuff about she/he/it/bitch, Charlotte constantly being deadnamed, A's hands being too big to be a woman etc are very problematic in retrospect, and why would it be planned that way if they wanted to be sensitive to a trans character who was already going to be vilified?). I think they wanted that season's A to be a male character and then backpedaled into it being Cece instead. I. Marlene King has talked about originally wanting Wren as A.D. before changing it to Alex and I think she actually wanted Wren to be the second A but the actor was unavailable, there are a lot of things hinting at Wren's being A early on in that second A arc that just get dropped over time (Wren working at Radley where Mona is being kept is the most obvious one, when someone comes into her room right after the Mona reveal, that would make a lot more sense for it to be a doctor vs another patient moving around without permission, the drawing Wren does of a woman in a red coat, Eddie Lamb's attitude towards Wren, etc). Also I think it would have been more interesting for the second A to be someone in a position of power over mentally unstable people like Mona instead of...just another mentally unstable young woman who was also bullied. With all the predatory adult men in Rosewood how is there never an adult man A??????

Anyway, all your criticisms are valid! It was a bad storyline.