The scene felt like an homage to "Gone With the Wind", if the story had been mistranslated and then passed by word-of-mouth through an office of Japanese anime nerds.

This whole setup is intended to highlight the melodrama among the aristocracy on the eve of a disastrous war. But its being pitched to an audience of 90s-era 6th grader boys in the guise of a cartoon about battling giant robots. So you get a few compressed scenes intended to set the stage without boring an audience that doesn't actually want to watch a 19th century romance novel.

Other anime have adopted this opening framing, too. The first three episodes of the original season of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure had a similar vibe, for instance. So did Samurai 7 and Code Geass.

But thirty years later, you've got a more (ahem) mature audience that really does just want to watch Rhett Butler seduce ditzy dowagers at ante-bellum ballroom gatherings. Now they're getting the context and the reference implied in the specific scene. They've just forgotten the entire rest of the narrative beyond which this scene is supposed to feel trite and regrettable.