From your link: Sense of "gracious, kind" (now obsolete) first recorded late 13c.; that of "mild, tender" is 1550s.

This is, of course, exactly what the halo effect would predict; a word that means "good" in some context should come to mean "good" in other contexts. The same effect explains the euphemism treadmill, as a word that refers to a disfavored group is treated as an insult.