And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke” to the point that we don’t even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular

I would argue the origin is sales. E.G. the publisher wants the sex appeal to sell, so that’s what they put in the game. Early ‘bro’ devs may be a part of this, but the directive from up top is the crux of it.

And that got so normalized, it became what gamers expect. And now they whine like toddlers when anyone tries to change it, but that just happens to be an existing problem conservative movements jumped on after the fact.

TL;DR the root cause is billionares.

Like aways.