It's... complicated.

At first the idea was it'd be training an actual "replica" of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for "more than friends", and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.

Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don't want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.

At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.