> gender neutral pronoun

I can't speak for the author, but it can just be easier to just go for a more impersonal tone.

At no point do you need to keep in my the gender of the people and the writing is a lot clearer (the models being women has no impact on the subject, which is the machine, so it's noise in this case)

> the models being women has no impact on the subject

It's part of the context; design doesn't exist in isolation. Was this prototype aimed at women? Was it just sexism or its off-shoot 'sex sells'? Or were there actually male models, but the author isn't mentioning it?

I would also argue that explicitly ignoring the fact that these models were women amounts to erasure, which is probably not intended, but a consequence of doing this.