You're not going to get hundreds of millions of dollars to do WoT on screen if one of the core aspects of the world is that your gender is tied to your soul and immutable. Call that wokeism, or call it media companies doing what they always do: play to the masses to maximize profit, but that's the basic fact.

Now, whether the only way to deal with that aspect of WoT is to change it, or if there's another way to handle it is a different question. I don't think the latter is impossible, but it'd still require a fair bit of tweaking.

As is whether the ripple effects Judkins mentions are actually thought through by the writers, and makes for an internally consistent story on screen. We won't know that till several seasons (if the show even gets that far), because this does ripple all through the series, in some ways.

But I'm not shocked this was changed. They telegraphed this long ago. In an early Twitter AMA, Judkins replied to someone who asked about the gender essentialism in WoT, and said that some of those aspects would be changed, and it appears they've done just that.

Hoping RJ would do the same is all spin, of course. There's literally no way for anyone to know. If he were alive, though, I wouldn't exactly be shocked if he went along with it, but I'm sure others think differently on this.