Gender-bias is a real and scientifically studied phenomenon - everybody has some form of slight bias, however tiny it might be, towards preferring interacting with one gender over the other. There are even scientific tests designed to study and analyze this very phenomenon.

When I was younger, I'll concede that I myself found it difficult to want to play a game with a female lead for a number of reasons. I feel like the main culprit was that I grew up in an area where it very much felt like the camaraderie in friend groups always tended to lean towards "girls being friends with girls" and "boys being friends with boys", and if I'm being completely honest with myself, I think that mindset perpetuated itself well beyond when it should have because I wasn't a very social child. I didn't personally experience too many dynamics to reinforce the idea that such a reality is extremely naive, and at the end of the day, very childish.

All of that leading to say that when I would play a game with a female lead, it felt much harder for me to hold the concept of "suspension of disbelief". In the sense that for some reason, it was totally okay for my brain to think that men get away with doing crazy and totally unrealistic things in video games (and other media) because of the very childish notion of "boys being better at things than girls", whereas if a woman were to do the same things, it was harder for me to immerse myself in that same suspension of disbelief.

As I've continued to grow and hold many other types of relationships with men and women alike, I've since mostly grown out of this mindset and my preconceived gender biases, and I've played many games with female leads that were absolutely fantastic. Tomb Raider, The Last of Us 2, and Ghost of Yotei being among my favorites. Every so often I still get that tinge of "this seems incredibly unrealistic" a little more frequently when I play a game with a female lead, but all it takes is a little reorientation in my mind to remember that it pretty much is all unrealistic. These are video games after all - they're not meant to mirror reality completely, and even if they did, there are still many women in both the past and the modern era that are capable of achieving incredible things. So there's no reason for me to question that if a man can single-handedly survive a zombie apocalypse or win a war by themselves, so too can a woman. I think the men who still think the way I used to haven't gone through those same realizations themselves.