I always had a hard time to council my memories of the Aids crisis with what actually happened. I was a child back then, and literally the first times I learned about it was from the information campaign our Bundesregierung started. There were mainly two spots...one really famous one which was mostly about the need to use condoms and then another one which was all about not stigmatising people with it, using the example of a child which is ill because her mother had it. Basically I skipped the whole fear phase and learned only about the existence of a stigma when public discourse has already moved to "hey, you really shouldn't judge". Hence I really didn't experience Diana hugging that child as a big deal. But I guess it maybe was if you lived in countries where the government had spend less money on convincing people to deal with it like adults….
Plus, I always remember some sort of documentary about Fergie my sister watched back in the day. Since that was before Fergie went completely off the rails, the tenor was how much she got victimised, and one thing which was said was that while Diana went to cute children which really worked well vor photo-ops in her charity work, Fergie had (supposedly) some really heart-breaking scenes too, including one where she held the hand of a dying women. I can't remember what illness it was, but the gist was that said women simply wasn't good looking enough (due to her illness), hence the photos were never really used by the press.
That's why I feel mostly neutral about the "Diana hugging the child" moment. Not because I think that she somehow used that child, but because I know perfectly well that that child had been an AIDS victim in the last stadium, with sores in the face and superthin, there most likely wouldn't have been a hug and if there had been one, the photos might have never been used.
