Thing is - this game might be good and it might have been fine with a female protagonist. But with how shitty socially most developers are and the trend of unnecessary female lead insertion, they’re not gonna get the benefit of the doubt. Did they even say anything about keeping the Ghost franchise self-contained in stories?
People loved Samus, Lara Croft, a host of women in FF series, the chick from Bayonetta, first Horizon Zero Dawn, etc. Maybe they shouldn’t have spent the past decade demonizing male protagonists, particularly white male, and making decisions on DEI instead of story. Yotei might make sense story-wise, but they poisoned the well too much.