Yeah that's the part I'm struggling with. Executives don't just greenlight any deranged cultist's idea of a game, especially for an 8 year long development cycle (implied obviously, the studio was sold to sony, there were reshuffles). At some stage you will find marketers Susan and Bob going, at a meeting, "look people, see this, we want a slice of the money APEX or overwatch are currently hoarding, you're gonna come up with a plan and layout strategy to achieve this".
You have alpha-beta test stages, focus group relay analysis, etc. You have safeguards in place to prevent this stuff from happening. It's mind-boggling to me that nobody stepped down from production and said "you know, maybe you shouldn't have a character look like a fucking transvestite or a de-gendered emasculated boy with a coat running around, because get this, nobody wants to play a game as one". Yet this didn't happen. It's like corporate and dev branches only meet once a year to bullshit one another over zoom, a bit like what happened with Anthem and EA/Bioware.