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I pretty much agree, yeah. Though Orientalism seems to imply that this viewpoint is one unilaterally imposed on Japan by Westerners; while that can be the case and it perhaps was in the example you offer up, I'd note it can be a two way thing where the romanticism is sometimes the intended outcome. The current-day Wakandaism of Japan was partially stimulated and encouraged by Japan itself in the post-war period to rehabilitate their global image from being that of an imperialistic enemy-state (see "Cool Japan"). There were both economic and geopolitical incentives to produce cultural exports, and there was government interest in using pop-culture diplomacy as a branding strategy (especially in the 1990s onwards).
The fact that there are weeaboos is not surprising; many things that Japan produced with its newfound economic power were massively intended for foreign consumption, with local Japanese elements downplayed for that reason. An early example of extremely successful Japanese cultural export was NHK's "Oshin", which was aired in many countries essentially free as a soft power gambit, with care taken to not trigger a sense of "cultural invasion". The kawaiiness and globalised nature of Japanese media was a way to make the product maximally approachable and unthreatening to international audiences (see the concept of mukokuseki (無国籍), or statelessness). These trends eventually also ended up spilling over into the local media landscape - in this light, the notion of Japan as an untouched land is a bit ironic. It's sometimes hard to know if the Wakandaism stems from people wanting to promote an untainted view of Japan because it legitimises their politics, or if it's the other way around and people attach their politics to something already high-status and exoticised for legitimacy.
South Korea seems to be undergoing a similar trajectory, gaining a huge amount of soft power by consciously adopting international idioms for broader appeal. And this is not to say I think this media is bad at all - I quite enjoy a good amount of Japanese and South Korean media. OTOH, a stark counterfactual is China, who in spite of economic success failed to develop significant soft power overseas and never really appropriately globalised their media (I actually really like many Mainland Chinese media properties, and this is not to say China absorbed zero foreign influence either, but there's a certain obstinate insularity to Chinese media; appreciation often relies on a preexisting understanding of a foreign cultural meta).
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