I'm still confused whether it's appropriate to refer to actresses as "actor". The guidance appears to be skewed. (I'm being completely earnest here - I don't want to offend anyone.)
It is generally appropriate, and increasingly preferred in many contexts, but not yet generally considered the only acceptable thing. (E.g., "actress" is almost never considered wrong.)
But consider that we used to have the word "doctoress" to refer to a female doctor. Using that feels weird.
For an even weirder example, see ‘priestess’. No-one ever refers to modern female priests as priestesses, but historians often refer to, say, female priests in Ancient Rome as priestesses. On the other hand, historians never use the term ‘doctress’ for archaic female doctors.
(Alternatively: then why don't we have separate words for black actors, white actors, native American actors, south-east Asian actors, transgender actors, and so on?)
This level of specificity probably only works for media in which there’s only one main female character.
Sort of like "model". Most of the time you just say "model" and it could be either sex, but if you want to talk specifically about male models you say that.
And we are talking about human language here, it's something that has evolved over centuries, to a large extent spontaneously. That's why we make some distinctions and not others that may seem equally important.
If we were talking about a programming language your argument be more relevant, although I would still argue that sex is a much more dramatic difference than race.