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It's difficult to say without official confirmation (which I am skeptical will ever come, at least while the show is running) if the Kalos backlash is why he was allowed to win in Alola.I'd say they care to some degree, or they wouldn't have let Ash become a regional Champion in the succeeding saga, with less effort on his part, to make up for Kalos.
There are three other possibilities (other than sheer randomness) I can think of; they wanted to follow the games by having a Kanto character become the first Alola champion, they had run out of spots and didn't want him to fall back or stall out again, or it actually was the writers and not the executives all along and the change after XY shifted the vote (or however it was decided) in Ash's favor.
Likely there are other possible reasons that slipped my mind at the moment.
And honestly if they do care about fan reaction I wouldn't say it's a point in favor of Cynthia winning.
Ash winning in Alola got a ton of positive attention for the anime--even Forbes reported on it. It's easy to imagine this leading to them deciding it brings the show good press if they let Ash win in each series, and JN has been trying to go viral and does things clearly intended to get the internet buzz going (Dragonite started trending after he caught one, and his JN party in general has a lot of crowd pleaser species').
This may be true, I admit that I struggle sometimes at factoring in that a lot of people (especially older ones) aren't as plugged into the internet.Besides all that, I'm sure that they didn't expect the huge backlash from Ash losing to Alain.
For someone watching the internet there was clearly a ton of hype for Ash to win a league with a very popular team that included his first final form psuedo and almost everyone fully evolved, but if you don't follow social media that can be easy to miss.