My guess is, despite the fact that there's a lot of anger in the online 40K community due to the Femstodes, the normie consumers won't care, because they don't give a flying shit about the lore. To them, 40K is just a toy soldier game they play at wargaming places or paint as a canvas. They see no difference between it and say, GI Joe, Marvel, Transformers, or Star Wars; they're just toy franchises for them to collect or play with. The people who care about the lore and the story, yes, they're up in arms. Just as they were with the Primaris. But let's get real here, those people represent a negligible amount of the people who buy this slop. Hell, some lore fans have spent years not painting a single army or playing a single game because of how GW raises prices all the time.
People will keep saying that 40K fans are going to boycott GW over this, just like they said when GW raised prices or forced them to accept the Primaris. But at the end of the day, this will all be just a nothingburger because the fuckin' whales don't give two flying shits if there's Fem Custodes or Fem Marines. The only thing they will care about is if they look nice or if they have good stats, which the Fem Marines that will inevitably come probably will have, since GW and their ESG masters would encourage people to buy them.
I hope I'm wrong about this, but experience has shown me otherwise. Forcing the Primaris in violated the lore from the 90s onwards. Jacking up the price tag is horribly anti-consumer, but they kept buying the product anyways.
The lore fans and the naysayers will continue to claim that an incoming boycott will kill GW, but the matter of the fact is, the whales are addicted, and that's all GW needs to keep moving forward. This isn't the SW fanbase that let Solo bomb at the box office as a ''fuck you'' to Disney after TLJ. How many times have we heard that GW is going to get fucked by 3D printing and angry fans, only for GW to keep on going because the people who buy their product don't care about their lackadaisical attitude towards lore and product prices? One too many times, in my count. GW will keep abusing the lore and their fans, but so long as the whales and the ESG companies keep the money coming in, they won't care, they never cared.