Which is ironic because often in the "macho" stories with the strong alpha males, they were seen as incomplete without love and it was the romance which made them more engaging to the audience. It was almost a cliche line for the villain in a the final showdown to declare "love has made you weak" to the hero.
There's something ironic that many feminist works today seem to be going in the opposite direction of the classics.
There's a funny parallel between some past villain going "your love has made you weak" then and feminists believing the same thing today.
I guess early protagonists getting a cute girl in the end (or throughout the story) sometimes was due to some sort of self-insert stuff. Like in Indiana Jones, you want to be this suave, handsome adventurer that travels the world, fights the baddies, gets the treasure and the girl in the end.
But then there's also movies like Predator, where the female isn't so much a love interest, as it is someone that is protected.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this kind of plot (especially for a straight forward action movie), even though female characters are a bit more like a plot device than actual characters. Of course, while not outright necessary, movies and TV shows still can profit from fleshing out their female characters... man... here's a weird example of that: Ripley (as the protagonist) and Higgs (as sort of a secondary character and sorta-kinda love interest?) in Aliens as sort of a role reversal. Or Terminator with Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. Two fleshed out characters, a romance plot and a tragic end. Funny how those movies get overlooked by feminists, huh?
If you listen to the angry feminists, you'd think any movie that came out before Captain Marvel only featured female characters that would have been at home in a 50s sci-fi schlock movie. You know: Blonde woman that only serves as eyecandy and the moment the monster pops up, she shrieks and faints.
I bet there's blog entries or articles written by feminists on why romance is toxic, but I genuinely fear to look for that, cause I know it would only piss me off.
Ultimately, what I can say about all this can be summed up into two sentences:
"Male gaze" and "objectification" gave us iconic movies in great number. Wokeism gave us Ghostbusters 2016 and Captain Marvel.