Why are some game devs do intent in uglifying female characters?

It started about ten years or so ago, and while it hasn't got super-common, it nevertheless has been happening again and again, particularly in certain big-budget triple-A games: And that's the phenomenon of deliberately uglifying female characters (especially if they are the protagonist playable characters).

The "uglification" doesn't only happen by creating a brand new character that looks more "homely". That's not really "uglification" per se, it's merely just creating an uglier character. The "uglification" happens when the character is significantly and deliberately uglier than the real-life model that was used to create that character, like what was done with Mass Effect Andromeda, where the playable female character is significantly "homelier" than the real-life model she was modeled after (while, curiously, no such uglification was done with the playable male character).

Another example would be this side character from The Last of Us Part 2:

Another form of female uglification happens when a sequel is made, and this is also something that people have noticed, and there are many examples:

The latest trend during the last few years, as many have noticed, is to make female characters look more masculine. In those older games the female characters look definitely uglier than their real-life counterparts, but not necessarily more masculine. However, the more recent examples, particularly in sequel games, show a very clear and significant masculinization.

One has to wonder why they are doing this and where is this trend coming from. Why are they making female characters look more masculine?

Many far-leftist social justice warriors might argue that people are only conditioned into expecting "unrealistic" standards of what's considered "feminine" and "beautiful", that gamers are bothered by those female characters only because they are accustomed to unrealistic overtly "feminine" proportions.

However, that's quite obviously not true.

If that were true, then the same gamers would complain how, for example, live action movie actresses "look too masculine" or, heck, women in real life look too much as such.

The fact is that a "feminine look" in video games is not just a stereotype: It corresponds to real life. That's the very reason why we consider a character to "look feminine": Because our human instinct, our visual pattern recognition that is innately finely attuned to recognize human faces, can detect what's typically a "feminine" and a "masculine" face. That's why the vast majority of women faces in real life don't bother us nor look "too masculine" to us: Because they look feminine.

It's very curious that the trend appears to be only in this one direction. It's very rare to see a male character who looks feminine, who has a feminine face, particularly one that has been deliberately "feminized" compared to his real-life counterpart or depiction in a previous version of the game.