Brack

You can certainly argue the Mandarin was conceived with cold war sensiblities, but over the decades he's become quite the badass villain, sort of like I.M.'s Dr. Doom.
Quite frankly, after Stane, Hammer, Osborne, Octavius, Conners, Brock, Stryker, Shaw having an "ethnic" evil guy would be a change of pace, not racist.

He's not a cold war character though. He's Yellow Peril racist caricature dressed up in cold war clothes. Sure he's not as bad as Yellow Claw, but he was barely used for years in the comics.

Michelinie/Layton, whose work most defines the movie Iron Man, never used him during their first run.

Even before that he was never used that much. He averaged about two appearances in monthly Iron Man comics a year pre-Iron Man #116 (M&L's first issue). At most 5 appearances, sometimes none. Between that and #259 in 1990, the Mandarin made SIX appearances in the monthly Iron comic (3 Denny O'Neil issues, 2 from M&L's second run, and a Howard Mackie filler).

It's not until the Byrne's run in the 90s that Mandarin had a massive presence in monthly Iron Man comics. That died again by the 2000s, until the movies arrived and we had so many Iron Man comics, that statistically you were going to have put Mandarin in some of them.

Anyone else feel like Loki ended up getting what he actually wanted in the end (rather than what he said wanted to the Avengers)?

We get that brief scene where it's clear he's being coerced into this somewhat by the Chitauri and Thanos. And Tony Stark comments that Loki's bringing them together as team (though he thinks so that Loki can defeat them).

But at the end Loki has got back to Asgard after being flung across the cosmos at the end of Thor, taken the Cube out of Thanos' reach, and put the Avengers between him and Thanos. While it appears he's defeated, he's actually up on where he was left post-Thor.