There’s actually an in book way to explain that, the clothing is always described as specific to the two rivers, and only Aiel have red hair. I agree The show was awful!
I don’t think that the ethnicity of the actors really matters all that much, the height & hair color are the only real trait that describes how Rand stands out. Honestly the only character with a skin color description I can recall is Tuon? And that isn’t really something that matters either…
Bigger issues as other people pointed out are things like inventing weird bullshit storylines when you have 10k pages of content to draw from, or messing with the “hard rules” of the magic system, such as you can’t burn out in a circle, or heal someone from death.
It ruined the suspension of disbelief immediately for me though. A rural village that doesn’t do constant international trade should have people living there that all look, speak, dress, and act similarly.
But the village looked like like an HR training video. To contrast, a new season of squid game just came out. Everyone is Korean. Everyone speaks Korean. Everyone looks Korean.
Right, the characters skin tones and real life ethnicities ruined the suspension of disbelief, because that’s harder to explain than Trollocs and the One Power??? Or Fades? Or the Dark One?
Or maybe you are hyper focused on specific, racial, details that you care about due to some internal biases?