You can even dress up Mithra
I was talking about console single player games without gender choice obviously, that's the genre Stellar blade belongs to.
You did too much research.
You don't even need to "research" to know what the gaming scene was like before lol. You just need to be a gamer for long enough.
I've been a gamer since 80-90s, "pretty female protagonist" in games was not a common thing back then. Except a few games like FF6/Tomb raider or Metroid maybe. In most other games they are often damsel in distress, rpg companions or date sim romance interest. And a lot of western crpg female doesn't even look pretty at all.
So I never really buy the whole "they are killing pretty female protagonists in video games!!" complaint cuz looking at longer timeframe I can't really feel the change is huge. Can't kill something that was not a trend.
I think the witch hunt on Stellar blade is a bit too extreme though. Stellar blade isn't anywhere close to the worst offender of selling sex in video games.