Anthropomorphising objects has been around forever. I remember when I was in Japan, a ton of stores had "mascots" that were just anthropomorphised versions of whatever was being sold. And that extended beyond stores and into stuff like traffic pylons, vending machines, trash cans, etc. Extending it to actual manga/anime/games just opens the floodgates, like that one series about the anthropomorphized soda bottles or the one about the anthropomorphized vagina that got cancelled. Kancolle isn't even the first instance of it being done to battleships.
I also follow this Singaporean artist that anthropomorphizes everything, usually to sexy and horrifying results (like a sealed pack of chopsticks before getting ripped apart).
In Japanese mythology, there is the idea that once an item is 100 years old it's turned into a yokai (aka spirit), so I'd say that's probably when all this stuff comes from. Stuff like the key Pokemon and others that people find stupid are probably based on this idea.
I dreamed I bought FFXV again and that among all the updates it has had were Aranea and Luna as party members and the option to buy a Cindy amiibo in-game to change her outfit. People kept using it to put her in stupid "sexy" outfits but I just gave the poor girl a T-shirt and jeans. Also pretty sure I had to lecture Prompto on appropriate touching. Anyway I woke up filled with a new appreciation for FFXV and a determination to buy it again then I remembered that the sexism seems to be the one fucking thing they haven't patched out :')))
I don't really understand why people can like Cindy. Not because of the fanservice, I'm aware people can like it. But Full Metal Alchemist did it much better, with her wearing proper robes for the kind of job she does while using a sports bra underneath. Which is far from perfect, obviously (Winry gets the short side of the stick and is used for titillation every once in a while, as opposed to every other woman in the series), but at least when I look at her clothes my inmediate thought isn't "why the hell is half of your skin exposed while you're working as a mechanic, do you want to end up in the hospital?".
Does Gladio get the same treatment when it comes to cutscene direction and how his body is framed in different shots as Cindy? I haven't played the game, but I'd say that no. People love to say "it's the same, cause Gladiolo is shirtless" when it's not the same at all, because the use of the camera is as, if not more, important than the design itself. I've seen scenes where people is naked in a shower that didn't feel sexualized, because it was shown as a normal and natural thing, and I've seen scenes where much less skin is shown but it felt much, much worse. Velvet design is absolutely awful, but I never felt that the camera was telling me "wohooo have you seen her boobs!", to give a recent example. Again, if there is some scene where this is actually enforced in Tales of Berseria, feel free to correct me, my memory is not perfect.
The biggest problem is that people just take things at face value, and don't bother to actually understand everything but the very surface. And then find like minded people and reinforce their views. This is the same when people says a group of people that's probably been working way over 80 hours a week for six months to have their favorite game in time for the holiday season is lazy.
