Pepe was my favorite groweing up, I liked the hopeless romantic angle he had. It wasn't until later that I realized that… yeah.
Pepe had a grand total of 17 shorts, (compared to 40 Roadrunner, and 45 Speedy cartoons. 50 Tweetie, 100 Sylvester, Bugs had about 180, Daffy had about 130, and Porky about 170, but they overlapped a fair bit)
So among the big lineup of recurring characters he was one of the ones that showed up the least. Even within those 17 the writers got tired of the formula pretty quick. Penelope was the usual victim (and yes, Victim is unfortunately the appropriate word) but they mixed it up by having it a disguised male cat that deserved to suffer, a mountain lion, fighting with a dog to get a room out of the cold... and in three of the shorts Penelope wanted him by the end. In the last one she was actively pusuing him and wanted him but just couldn't handle the smell.
Yeah, the unfortunately rapey aspects have not aged well at all, but even within the original cartoons they were moving away from that after a handful of shorts, almost half of them weren't quite that formula.
The big issue is that Penelope was scared and a victim. The same dynamic of being chased is fine when Coyote chases Roadrunner (even though he wants to EAT him) because its a game, there's no danger, and Roadrunner is oblivious or even has fun, he's in on it. In Tiny Tunes Fifi had the same gimmick but was fine. (While Elymra was... not.) The modern show a decade ago had Lola going after Bugs and it was okay there because Bugs wa never scared or in danger and any suffering was generally his own doing for agreeing to something when he could have said no. MLP has Pinky Pie chase Twilight with that exact hop homage and its fine because its not sexual.
The bad formula was bad, but they were already fixing it 60 years ago, most versions since have toned that bad shit down, and other stuff has the same chase dyOOnamic without being problematic. The character doesn't have to be scrubbed out entirely when a tweak and change in approach fixes him so easily.