Wasn't there this huge leak a couple years back right before Valhalla came out that showed that a bunch of the Ubisoft devs across several studios were turbofags about female protagonists and corporate kept telling them to stop it and put a male lead? Like Bayek was suppose to die early on and his wife was suppose to be real main character. Evie Frye was suppose to have a bigger part but Jacob ended up getting a lot more screentime, he even got put front and center on the boxart. Kassandra was supposedly the ONLY original protagonist but corporate forced them to add a male lead. The devs were super salty about this and had Kassandra appear in that Valhalla DLC to remind everyone that she's canon.
The leak never had anything about Valhalla but I'm willing to bet they tried again to have Eivor only be female and Odin be male (which is stated as the canon choice) but corporate likely came in and told them to add a male choice, so they probably just grabbed the VA for Odin. I feel like a part of the Yasuke decision was some 500 IQ strategy of "ha, we included a male protagonist like corporate wanted AND we can force people to play the female because the alternative is a negro!"