When I started out, I leaned toward AFGNCAAPs or letting the player customize absolutely everything. More recently, I’ve been growing fonder of PCs with characterization, but with a few particular features (including gender) left out for the player to imagine as they like. The protagonist of Enigma of the Old Manor House is a teenager who fears backing down from a dare more than they fear breaking into the spooky abandoned house on Halloween, and there are probably some unintentional Americanisms because that’s the background I’m writing from, but their name, gender, ethnicity, and so on is left to the player to imagine.
(Similarly the protagonist of Loose Ends is a recently-turned vampire with a snarky streak and some problems with authority, the protagonist of Death on the Stormrider is a fish out of water snapped out of their moping by the need to protect their brother, and the protagonist of Labyrinthine Library of Xleksixnrewix is a devious little kobold. This is the sort of thing I tried to avoid in Scroll Thief and didn’t really succeed at—at one point the story declares that all spellcasters are claustrophobic, because I wasn’t willing to establish that as a trait of the protagonist in particular.)