For me, personally, character customization is necessary. Especially cosmetically, because I always think it helps separate them from myself. I would struggle to play a game where I had no say in the appearance of the MC. Perhaps it is part of why I myself want to emphasize it and make it mean something.
I think having ‘preset’ character options for players who don’t want to think about any of that is nice, though for someone like me who has written out entire scenes to integrate the customization it’s going to be annoying to set up preset characterization later. Probably would make a custom set of flags for checking, then skipping the questions themselves to go to descriptions with a sentence or two written out to help with flow. The more flow there is in the customization, the more difficult it would be to do something like that I think. If I had done a mirror scene establishing the important bits then doing an alternative summary would probably be easier.