Agreed. I was on the scene a bit later; there was a steady stream of hopeful signs of wider appeal on the fringes of gaming while the "hardcore" segment just kept getting more hardcore. Early on,
Myst seemed to lead toward a more widely accessible game style, because it didn't require constant struggle just to move through the game world. But the game play, finding hidden codes and solving puzzles, still mostly tested players' willingness to beat their heads against a wall. The entire "CD-ROM game" industry followed that lead into a blind alley. MMO games start out with wide varieties of options ("I leveled by crafting!") but over time the developers' attention remains focused on raids and other hardcore features as the only way to maintain player interest long term. In the early oughts there were endless "women in gaming" seminars in the casual games industry, but it appears that market has been mostly ceded to the "free to download" segment with a financial model based on addictive behavior, which is somewhat easier to elicit in males.
(My gig was interactive storytelling... which it turns out, besides being fiendishly difficult to create, almost no one in any market segment actually wants.)
As far as woke, I was writing <a href="
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Saga">gender-ambiguous second-person character encounters</a> in the late 1980s. The goal (not really possible but we tried) was to not attract attention to it, rather than to highlight it.
My point is, the imagination space Musk thinks he can discover or rediscover has been scoured for half a century. If he's capable of getting playable games developed at all, what's he going to do, make first person shooters where the only female characters are damsels to rescue? A sausage fest MMO? He'll discover that it takes a lot more effort to play a modern computer game than to like an alpha-misogynist tweet, and the market will be fatally limited.