There kinda was "too pretty for porn" back in the day. In the early days of porn, it was still a highly disreputable endeavor so most of the actresses they used were whatever they could get--aging hookers and failed actresses who weren't attractive enough to make it in Hollywood or Broadway. Why would any girl who was even remotely close to being a 10 ruin her life in the porn gutter when she still had the chance to be a mainstream model or actress?
As porn became a bigger and bigger business, they started being able to attract girls who were 10s... You had companies like Vivid whose main claim to fame was the fact that their female performers looked like actual supermodels.
But that was mainly in the white side of the industry. On the black side, we had a few bombshells but there remained the perception that black porn was kinda ghetto. There were always frequent remarks about how ugly the girls in black porn were, and (black) comedians about when you watch black porn the girls are all ashy and had razor scars and bullet wounds and stuff.
This was a completely unfair assessment, of course. I'd say most of the black porn stars then were not knockouts but they at least looked... average.
Around the beginning of the Golden Age of Black Porn, I think the girls started getting a LOT better looking. But they still didn't look like models... they looked like "regular" cute hood chicks and college girls (which is exactly what got me into porn at the time, because the girls looked like chicks I knew and could relate to, as opposed to previous set of black porn chicks with the terrible weaves and horrid early 90s boob jobs).
But still... once in a while you saw a chick who just had that real "girlfriend" look, or looked like an R&B singer... and you'd wonder "She looks like that, and she is wasting her life doing THIS???"
Those were the "too pretty for porn" girls. And really... Gabrielle Carmouche was never really one of them. She was okay looking... but not drop dead.
But then, you started getting hotter and hotter black girls... signifying that porn was becoming more of a viable career. One where truly beautiful girls could make some decent bread, even more so than mainstream acting or modelling.
(I remember when one of the white girls from Tyra Banks's "American Next Top Model" got into porn for a while. Everybody was shocked and scandalized, wondering why she would leave the prestigious world of mainstream modelling to get fucked on camera. She said that it didn't seem like a big deal to her because the way she saw it, you do about the same amount of fucking in porn as you do in mainstream modeling when your agency is trafficking you to all the Epsteins and Casablancas and Trumps of the world... the only difference is that in porn it is on camera and you make a LOT more money doing it!)
So porn just became a real, legitimate arm of the entertainment business... and one with a lower bar of entry. So a lot of beautiful girls who in the past would have tried to make it as Hollywood actresses or New York models or even as singers, opted for porn instead. Hell, some of the even hoped that the porn would be a gateway to them making it as actresses or singers (which was an unfortunate delusion).
Anyway, about how Gabrielle Carmouche got confused with Jaimee Foxworth, even though they looked nothing alike. Well, you need to remember there wasn't as much internet exposure back then and most normies didn't even watch porn. They didn't know how to access it, there were no tube sites yet.
But everybody had heard the rumor that an actress who had been on a popular black sitcom was doing porn. What they didn't realize is that there was more than just one. You had Jaimee, you had Gabrielle... and then Maia Campbell was at the beginning of her mental health crisis, and some raunchy pics of her had leaked, along with rumors that there were videos of her getting railed.
So basically, most people didnt know what they were talking about. (Another thing: this was an era when many people--even some regular porn watchers--still thought it was deeply abnormal to know or care about the names of porn performers. It was something that marked you as a creepy, smut-obsessed loser)
Addressing the earlier question about which other porn actresses had done mainstream work: I believe Sophia Fiore had appeared on some tv shows. There used to be a fragment of a Nickelodeon pilot she did as a teen that was floating around.
There are some others I'd have to remember too. There were a bunch in the 70s, before you had real professional porn actors... a lot of the performers (especially the men) were like, out of work actors would shoot porn between jobs. So you could see some dude in a daytime soap opera or a KMart advert and a couple of months later he's in a dirty movie.
And then there was the famous case of Marilyn Chambers who was a commercial model when she was hired to star in one of the first professional, big budget porn movies, Behind the Green Door. At the same time, she scored the dream gig of appearing on the box of Ivory brand detergent.
And coincidentally, the detergent box debuted around the same time as the porn movie, giving the movie massive publicity and causing a horrific scandal for the soap company.
Also I'm sure you know about India, who was in the R&B girl group Harmony Innocents, or Heather Hunter who was a dancer on Soul Train.
Lemme try to think of some more... there's a whole bunch...