I just saw someone say that "he" is a gender neutral pronoun. I've only heard it very rarely used as gender neutral, and that's only in the same context as using 'men' and 'man' to refer to the human race as a whole. The context of this person's claim was not that context, considering they were referring to a specific character.
Yeah, "he" is generally the default people use when they're not using "they" as something vaguely gender neutral. It's not really meant to be a specifically gender neutral pronoun, just the first one they come up with. Attempts to avoid this lead to things like tabletop RPG sourcebooks that randomly change pronouns when discussing hypothetical, unnamed characters taking action. I swear I've seen at least one paragraph where the editor didn't catch that the same character was referred to as "he" and "she" in the same paragraph.
There might be some language-related context for it as well. In French, at least, you use "le" and "les", the masculine pronouns, for anything that has any male parts. If a group of people is mixed gender, regardless of how many of each gender are in it, you always use the masculine "le" or "les"; "la" and "las" are used only for something 100% female. I think at least some other Romance languages may be the same way.
Frankly, I can't stand gendered nouns. Not because of some social justice-related righteous anger, but because the choice of gender is variable based on every language and sometimes seems downright random if you haven't researched the exact naming rules.