I think it really depends. There is a way to do it without shoehorning someone in. Take James Bond. He's a macho man action hero. There's really no reason I can see that he needs to be a white guy. If you can find someone of any other race that gives off that some Bondian energy, that guy can play him. There's the argument that he's always been white, and if the movie was going to be set in the 1960s then yeah the actor will probably be white as there were not many non-white people living in Britain. If it's set in 2021 it's pretty natural for him to be from another race as Britain is much more diverse now.
I really don't watch too many movies so I'm not sure off the top of my head what an example of shoehorning is, but I can absolutely envision it.
This is a good point, and it's not one-size-fits-all. There's no real reason Idris Elba or Oscar Isaac couldn't pull off Bond (well, besides Isaac being not-British, I guess). But I would also argue that Bond's energy is so unmistakably, deliberately male that you couldn't gender-swap the character in the same way you could race-swap them and keep the same character.
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