While I don't think you're wrong, necessarily, but my first thought was that you may view FFX as the starting point, because that's when they finally had powerful enough hardware with the PS2 to make those things actually workable and believable. Full voice acting also played a big role.

The tropes were always there (well I can't say "always", I haven't played all of the old ones), they were just very limited in what options they had to work with that convey those motions

Go play FFXI again, it's filled to the brim with goofy tropes. You just can't see their exact facial expression using such small (albeit detailed) sprites.

Edit: I actually meant to say "go play FFVI again," but either works. I do think VI is a better representation of a dev team basically pushing how far you can get a person to relate to and emphasize with a little guy made of sprites or a handful rudimentary polygons. It was a lot harder to create engrossing narrative games when your human characters didn't always resemble what they were supposed to be. It takes you out of it a bit.

Of course people have gotten way better, and indie scene has shown that it can be done well, and people love it when it is.