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I am reminded of the recent trend in video game translation of also erasing references to gender, even in cases which were deemed non-offensive by Americans just 20 years ago: Pikmin 2 remaster, Live-A-Live remake, Yokai Watch (notable for also removing references to obesity and advisability of its negation), Resident Evil 4 VR, Attached Picture is of the TTYD remaster.
At least your example has the justification that C S Lewis wrote a different type of text (i.e. a novel), than one which producers needed (i.e. a screenplay), so changes were unavoidable. But a video game script in Japanese or in English is the same type of text, the only changes needed are those which are limitations of technology, like if the game engine only supports item and in-game characters names of 7 or less characters.
I think the justification for making even fictional socities blind to gender dimorphism in humans, is to make it unthinkable in reality. So that if the consumer of media does encounter someone not yet blinded, he is to made to feel perplexity (for making a distinction based on a difference of which the consumer doesn't perceive the existence) and hostility (according to contemporary mores, not making a distinction is the default, and insufficiently justifying making a distinction is called "discrimination" and highly frowned upon).
Such is one possible tool to socially construct a consensus of gender blindness.
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I've noticed a trend in character creation along those lines - 'male' and 'female' in character creation are replaced with 'body type 1' and 'body type 2', and then player characters are referred to exclusively as 'they'. World of Warcraft is an example of this. It frankly makes me feel very uncomfortable and aggressively dehumanised.
What I find most frustrating about it is that it seems like the progressive case against doing this should be obvious - removing all gendered words and enforcing a single pronoun on everyone seems like, well, misgendering. If you took seriously the concern that using the wrong gendered language for someone might be cruel or even traumatic, it seems like you should be sensitive to this, and want to provide more options, rather than throwing everyone into a de-gendered basket of 'they'.
I conclude that they do not in fact take seriously that concern, and that it was and is not the actual underlying motive. Or at least, if there's a motive along the lines of "don't be cruel", it is not applied evenly to everyone, and indeed making certain types of people uncomfortable might be good.
I have never understood this cope, they unambiguously code to "male" and "female" and if my memory is correct in ER they even correspond to a masculine and feminine voice when you select them.
That's another sign to me that it's not a particularly earnest gesture of inclusion - they are obviously male and female, with nothing changed but the names. No additional work has been done, so no additional expense has been incurred. From a development perspective, changing the names of the genders is a trivial task, and defaulting to singular they in all dialogue is slightly cheaper and easier than having distinct male and female variations.
The banner is inclusion, arguably, but the actual itself is profoundly lazy, and insofar as what it does is ignore or misgender everybody who identifies as anything other than they/them (which at last count was approximately everyone), it's actually less welcoming and inclusive.
But it's easy, it looks trendy and/or fits the cultural moment, and if it continues, by reducing the diversity and variability of humans - making everyone a bland, standardised they - it suits the interests of systems designers. A perfect symbol for the time, really.
(Yes, they're distinct male and female types now, but they don't need to be. For instance, in Splatoon 3 there are no gendered body types or identifications - everyone is just an androgynous little squid-kid. I guess the justification there would be that the characters are prepubescent and shouldn't have visibly different physical characteristics, but still, that is a long way from the time when the Pokémon manuals explicitly recommended that the children playing choose the character of their own gender.)
(Alternatively, consider the character creation in a game like BattleTech - there are no gender-locked features. It's been a little while since I played, but I believe that instead you just pick body characteristics from a big chart, so beards, breasts, etc., are perfectly interchangeable. Then at the end you pick pronouns from a drop-down menu. What's gone is any sense that these characteristics form two natural clusters. Instead of men and women, what we have are a bunch of isolated, chopped up body parts that can be reassembled in any combination. It's hard not to feel a bit dehumanised.)
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