Well of course it did,with the fans right?
Going from that viewpoint, yea, it probably did, although I certainly don't remember it always being an issue even within fandom itself.
I don't remember when it started, but if I had to take a guess it might have been around 2011/2012 with the more blatant examples in BBS.
It's still questionable though if this issue in particular has gotten any higher in the developer's priority list.
The thing with FF12 is that it's a huge game compared to KH2 and KH1 and with a good amount of massive towns/city related locations with multiple zones in them so the NPCs were needed and made sense.I mean one city in FF12 generally was like the size of 1 whole world in KH2 or bigger alone.
I look back at the areas of past KH games and there's honestly no place for them add dozens of NPCs because the size of the games/worlds either weren't big enough to have them just placed anywhere or they just generally avoided adding most town related locations or there was just none that existed in the source material for them to bother.
When it did have a sort of Town/village type location they actually did put a little effort including a few NPCs most of the time like in Mulan/Timeless river/Twilight Town/Pride Lands/Radiant Garden,even though said areas were mostly still pretty small.
It's why in the end i generally had no issues overlooking the lack of NPCs from those games.
This is correct of course, I used the example mostly to point out that it is definitely
not an issue of hardware limitations as an apparently still widespread misconception claims.
The lack of background- or "unimportant" NPCs within the KH series is not a case of technical problems or restrictions but a
conscious choice in priority by the developers, the generally smaller areas being certainly a factor but not the only one.
In past KH games there were several "town like" places already though in which some would expect more activity such as Traverse Town (which had a Tidus-palette swap and two or three generic NPCs but that was it), Agrabah (which is supposed to be a busy rather big city brimming with activity and people, the capital of a sultanate at that), Port Royal (which doesn't have any NPCs besides Will and Elizabeth), Radiant Garden (which has at least some shop owners and some of the FF cameos roaming about in KH 2, but only Scrooge and Merlin in BBS where it is supposedly at its height as the "capital of Light" and a place rivaling at least Rabanastre from FF XII in size even though TAV can only explore a bare minimum of the whole place).
In the case of BBS' Radiant Garden it is even more jarring since Nomura consciously choose to
scratch the child-versions of the FF cameos (Leon and the gang, including Cloud) because he felt it would become "too crowded" with Ansem's apprentices (who also appear in cutscenes only and, with the exception of Braig, were arguably added only to pander to Organisation XIII fans as the appearances of Dilan, Aeleus, Ienzo and Even are arguably completely useless and unimportant to BBS' story and TAV as characters).
They
could have added the child-versions of the FF cameos at least as wandering NPCs but actively choose to do not.
Twilight Town in KH 2 is literally the only place which actually had an actual wider number of unnamed actual background NPCs, so the issue that they
could have placed more NPCs in town/city-like areas if they
wanted to still stands.
I admit though that personally I never had (and still don't have) that much of an issue/problem with the "lack of NPCs" and considering all the other things that can (and in some cases probably
will) go wrong it is still very low on my list of concerns.