Oh, I feel pretty confident saying it's not only modern sensibilities. As a kid, I was not allowed to watch Pinocchio because it gave my mom nightmares when she was a child. As yes, it is dark, especially the whole pleasure island/donkey slaves bit.

I know with Snow White, part of Disney's choices were just to showcase what they could do. I don't know how much of that persisted with their second full-length film, but I agree the artwork is gorgeous. In both cases, I spent too much time marveling at the backgrounds when I was rewatching old Disney movies about a year ago.