I think that response illustrates the point just as well as you did in the original post. Nowadays, any character with more than 1% masculinity is considered to be a bloodthirsty prick. Like you said though, to each their own. If somebody wants to read a story about John the Gender Non-Binary Preschool Teacher fighting racism, or Beowulf fighting monsters, that's up to them. That's the market.
Ordinarily I'd agree with you about the market deciding, but that's the thing.
The market already decided.
The kind of fiction this guy is asking for has been slowly but steadily driving the audience away, to the point where what used to be in the pulp era one of the most popular genres of fiction read by nearly everyone has been ghettoized and shunted under the rug until something sufficiently entertaining to be made into a tv series has a breakout success. 70 years ago, EVERYBODY knew who Burroughs, Howard, et al. were, and read them regularly. People like this prick have been defaming and lying about their work since the 30's, and been trying to make writers of scifi and fantasy into some kind of elite literati, while more and more readers just...stop reading, because the stories are boring and the characters are horrible.
I'm not trying to do a market correction here. I'm trying to save what remains of the market after these people have had a near-century of control over what actually gets published. That market absolutely still exists, just as wide as it was in the days of the pulps, you just have to appeal to it.
Mr. Barron doesn't understand how, doesn't care, or both.