“portrayed as people without personality flaws”
Hollywood truly hates heroes who are not deeply flawed.
(The Clinton administration also had this attitude, and Bill and Hillary would not let anyone near them who *did not* have a bad personal failing known to them. They felt they could not *trust* honest and upright people. Plus, they wanted something to destroy them with if they turned on the Clintons.)
(Oddly enough, they shared this same sensibility with Adolf Hitler, who surrounded himself with freaks and deviants.)
In any event, Hollywood craves to tear down heroes, not build them up, using the excuse that there *are* no heroes, and to portray the heroic is just propaganda. So they use “deconstruction”, negative propaganda, to do this.
This is why the remake of The Alamo was such an incredible flop. Audiences wanted the heroes of the Alamo portrayed as the heroes they were, *not* to have them depicted as bigoted, cruel, stupid and cowardly, as Hollywood depicted them.
This mood even extends out of the US. Not too long ago, a Mexican film director made a movie about an almost mythical Mexican hero, and he pulled out all the stops to make him look noble and magnificent. The Mexican movie critics were terribly bitter at him, and utterly hated the movie, giving it terrible reviews and said it was full of lies.
But the Mexican public *loved* the movie, because it showed them a Mexican hero they could be proud of. No scandal, no personal failings, no war crimes, etc. An ideal hero.
I don't think it's really that sinister. It's just more interesting and more realistic. People aren't perfect, even great people.
That's why I found the "John Adams" series to be so fascinating. The Founding Fathers weren't gods; they were flawed people, too, grasping for a solution to a very big problem, and a number of them didn't even agree that we did the right thing any step of the way (I'm mainly thinking of Jefferson here).
I've been around the military for most of my life, and there are some fantastic people in it, but they have their issues. Most people don't know any Spec Ops guys in general or SEALs in particular. They want to know what they're like, and it could be distancing for some to see them portrayed as a group of Adonises. Others may like it as an aspiration of something to be.
It really just depends on who's watching and what they're looking for, I guess.