An ironic progression of the player-player character relationship, "role-playing" is supposed to be a player taking on a role, as in different from themselves. Players were given customizable PCs because the audience were the tabletop nerds, RPGs in vidya used to be as niche as their tabletop pen and paper counterparts, so they came in with the expectation that they would be creating a character to play as who isn't literally them. Then they became mainstream and the normies and brownoids treated their character as an extra social media account, just an avatar to act as an idealized form of themselves. The old school role players are still out there, but they remain on the fringe as always, while the basic mechanics of "RPGs" have grown to become ubiquitous to gaming.