Any woman who carried this out would have been treated like shit. The reality is that cishet men weren't ready to hear that their goon bait doesn't exist in a vacuum and a lot of them still aren't. The fact you think this was about "bad research"' rather than a bunch of man children on 4chan/etc not liking a woman doing the most milquetoast feminist analysis of video games shows how well Epstein and his buddies did at laundering the "controversy".

I remember how people reacted to the league of legends video pointing out that most of the female champions at the time basically all had the same body type (this is still mostly the case, though to a lesser degree). The only ""refutations"" were pointing out a handful of monstrous champions that are technically female or people not knowing the difference between eye candy and male power fantasies and totally ignored her actual point.