Companies have been opening up options in character creation across games to allow more diversity. More and more games allow you to select your name, gender, race, skin tone, physical attributes, personality, voice, and sexual orientation. These developers have discovered that people want to play characters they can relate to and this is mostly celebrated.
This person wanting to play as a male is a perfectly valid desire. It's the exact same reason I never played any of the previous Witcher games despite it otherwise being my kind of game; being forced to be Geralt breaks my immersion. I wonder how much more popular the Witcher series would be if it had even the most basic level of character customisation.
In a game where you are playing a role you define with your playstyle, that makes alot more sense. Here, you are playing an established story. No matter what choices you make in your gameplay, the character in this game will always react how they would react in that situation. It's not really intended to be that style of immersive, it's an immersive storyline, but you are not playing an avatar that is intended to represent you, or your imagined character.
Tomb raider games managed to be best sellers in an age where it was "wrong" to have a female protagonist. I think this game will do ok.
I will never understand people not being able to play a game because of something so trivial.
When a game gives me the option I will always pick female characters because I'd rather look at a girl than a dude, but if it doesn't and I have to play as a dude I don't have a meltdown.
I'll play the next Witcher game just like I played the previous ones: sat on the couch sipping mojitos and eating goat cheese and hot pepper flavored chips in my underpants.