Since Sony acquired the studio, they should lay off the leadership with no severance packages and let the actual devs to retool the game into f2p for a relaunch.
Images says all.
Well, in AAA games characters aren't just simply designed by a single specific person. Games are collaborative works with a lot of people involved for any thing, particularly in AAA games. In case of character design:
There are the inputs from people from marketing telling what works and doesn't in that specific market, or what target user / niche spot are they focusing. And from a catalog/editorial team who also tells the team to try to don't overlap and differentiate enough with this or that other somewhat similar project they have in the works.
Plus also a game design team (leaded by the creative director) + writers who also provide indications of what type of personality, faction/alien race/lore/personal story/etc., high level look it should have (maybe this character should be very slim and tall, or super musculated, etc), which kind of gameplay it has, that maybe has to be reflected on their looks, etc.
Then there's a character design team, with an art director above them setting the guidelines and artstyle, and game director over all the devs directing them, and the producer who makes sure the teams reaches the milestones within the assigned budget, time and quality expected.
In recent times there are the woke DEI censors too, and DEI censorship guidelines.
As usual in any group of people, there are people there with different tastes, opinions and interests. Rarely everybody agrees. So depending on their rank/position, they negotiate and normally their opinion is the one mostly taken for their area of responsability / expertise, often always leaving a portion to the other ones involved, hearing the others and adapting a bit.
Gamesdev is also an iterative process, so there are different rounds where stuff gets done, tested/evaluated both internally and externally by expert devs of each area but working in other teams of the company, PR people who did work reviewing games at top places, feedback from Q&A team, player tests and player research done with the players of the target user, etc. There's people dedicated to these things. With that feedback the game gets iterated and "improved" as the people in charge of each area (listed in the previous paragraphs considers).