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No, the message painted Harris as an ideologue concerned about trans people, and that this is bad. The claim that the ad said it's bad because it's irrelevant, rather than because it's something the audience thinks of negatively, is something you made up.
The ad has two simple parts
"Harris is for they/them" = Harris is concerned about someone else's issues, particularly a pet cultural issue of trans folk who no one cares about.
"Trump is for you" = Trump cares about the topics you care about.
Now we can go and check polling to see what voters actually care about cause they'll tell us! And affordability/prices/economy has continued to be the no 1 issue over and over and over again, and transgender people (for or against) continue to be one of the least cared about topics.
The ad would not work if it was "Harris for they/them, Trump against they/them", because voters don't give a shit either way! They see it all as unimportant.
Trans is actually very unpopular, and republicans have successfully won on being ‘against they/them’- although you are correct that the issue in general is low salience.
One of the problems with trying to run on a low-salience 80-20 issue where you are on the right side is that disagreeing with voters about the salience of an issue is, itself, behaviour that marks you out as out of touch. The only reason Trump got away with it in 2024 was that so many left-aligned groups were helping him make the issue salient.
The classic example in the UK was our relationship with the EU. From the 1990s through to the Brexit referendum in 2016, closer integration of the UK into the EU was spectacularly unpopular, but every time the Tories tried to run a Eurosceptic campaign the median voter punished them for "banging on about Europe" instead of talking about the issues voters cared about.
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I think it's fair to say that there's a bit of both. You're overlooking the second part of the ad - "Trump is for you" - and the overall pun that comes with it. The message wasn't just "Harris is an ideologue", but "Harris is an ideologue who will focus on the wellbeing of people you hate while leaving you in the lurch; Trump, on the other hand, will focus on your wellbeing". That is, even if we grant that the specific ideology being actively repellent to voters was an active ingredient, there's still an associated promise on Trump's part to cut through the ideological bullshit and actually materially help normal people like you instead of such-and-such minority. I think it's probably the case that the ad worked because it combined both approaches, the "negative" boo-outgroup message and the "positive" I'll-look-out-for-your-interests pledge.
"We are on the side of normal Americans, whereas the Democrats are a rainbow coalition of un-American freaks and weirdos" has been the GOP's best message since before GOP was a right-wing party. "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" was Blaine's description of Grover Cleveland's coalition in 1884. (That time the message didn't take.) Despite the best efforts of occasional unity Dems like JFK or 1st-term Obama (FDR talked like a unity Dem but his practical approach to politics in the New Deal era was a machine politician running a rainbow coalition), the Dems let the GOP get away with this because being a rainbow coalition is part of the Democratic Party's institutional DNA even more so than being left-wing.
The only unifying message that the Democrats are comfortable running on is "Throw the GOP bums out", and even then they want to say "Throw the GOP bums out for the sake of women, minorities, union workers, disabled people..." Needles to say, that was a winning message this year.
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