[Tervuren]

I don't think the difference is that stuff like this is a new idea.
The difference is that it's harder to find anything different promoted.

I'm a gamer not so much a movie or TV series kinda guy.
Character creator where one can play a game as male or female has been around a long time.
What I'm observing is that less mainstream games are taking the resources to craft different experiences.

It used to be worthwhile to play games like this multiple times and with different races or sexes.
Now it could be they are getting cheap, or in an effort to make a bigger game the details for replay ability get cast aside.

On top of this a lot of story telling in games and movies seems to have a fixed format that fails flat with me.
An obvious example would be the Lord of the Rings movies.
They took fixed characters changing their environment and re-wrote them to dynamic characters changing to the environment.

In the original LOTR Aragorn had a fixed purpose to be king of Gondor from before the book's time even started.
Each step he took was to bring that time and place to be.
It was fascinating to read his character revealed piece by piece.

In the movie version he shirked his place as king. Then had a "dynamic" moment of going into the kingdom of the dead.
It felt hollow throughout.

Then another matter is throwing out consistencies in fictional worldbuilding.
When this happens I "Drop" whichever content as official that I enjoyed less.
Leaving one set that fits with itself and doing my best to forget the rest ever exists.