If you watched Agapova's past fights, she was anything but "obvious".
She literally learned how to throw an actual punch in this very fight, against Cifers. And before that, she had only learned how to throw a kick in her last fight, against Santos in Invicta. Agapova has been improving by leaps and bounds working at ATT, on top of growing a lot bigger and more muscular, all since her Contenders fight less than a year ago.
It was far from clear that she was value at worse than -300 against an opponent in Cifers who was even striking with Angela Hill and whose main weakness is to wrestling and submissions, skills Agapova doesn't really have beyond a RNC when the opponent is badly hurt.
As we saw with Tobe Hooper a week ago against Caceres, you simply don't know when young fighters will make a huge leap in ability or not.