Yeah Jodie Whittaker was not good.
Even if her stories hadn't been so poorly written (at least partly because of the need to educate — I mean, Doctor Who has always been a bit preachy and didactic, but a good example of where that detrimentally affected writing was series 12 of the new series, which felt it had to educate us about the little-known phenomena of anthropogenic climate change and pollution, and how terrible they are, giving us both "Orphan 55" with a completely non-innovative version of the "it was Earth all along" twist, and the even heavier-handed "Praxeus"), and her companions hadn't been bland as hell and characterised almost solely based on the convenience of the plot (Ryan's dyspraxia showing up only sporadically and at emotionally-useful junctures, for example), it seemed like the direction she'd been given was "Imagine you're a particularly gormless and ebullient Cbeebies presenter. Okay, great! Now remove all remaining intelligence, social skills, analytical ability, courage, emotional stability, gravitas, and nous. Brilliant. Now give yourself the attention span of a stoned budgie and a memory like a colander with bullet holes."
Even the bits where we're supposed to marvel at how smart she is, we're just told she's doing something smart, rather than being impressed by her smartness through the plot and writing (which, admittedly, would require smart writers), and the character seems to have no idea what she's doing and to be surprised by what she's managed (which doesn't stop her informing us all "I'm really clever, me").
An example of the weird characterisation is how they decided, for some reason (not at ALL because they thought adding a bit of neurodiversity-signalling bullshit would ingratiate them with the fanbase, oh no), to unorganically shoehorn in extra bits of autistic stereotypes to the Doctor's character, and just flat-out have her randomly interject "I'm so socially awkward, me, haha, look at me, I'm just not good with people because I'm socially awkward and don't know how to empathise or interact with humans!" every so often. I also suspect they were afraid of allowing a female Doctor to be empathetic, or good with people, to the extent male ones were, for fear of appearing to stereotype a female Doctor.
I'm aware the Doctor has always had some little alien quirks in previous incarnations, and found human behaviours different or even ridiculous, but the character has a lot of experience interacting with humans and supposedly an inconceivable level of intelligence including the type used in dealing with others, and any oddness has been down to not caring whether he seems odd to this particular human, rather than social ineptitude. And anyway, just telling us "Ooh I'm socially inept, me" is appalling writing.
Different Doctors have had different personalities, presumably (in-universe) because of different brain structures or something, so some might have been more irascible, some more enthusiastic, some more sardonic, some more playful, and so on. But past learning, experiences and memories are supposed to be the same, fundamental values like compassion and belief in human potential and distaste for violence are supposed to be the same, and they should be identifiably the same basic "soul" (for want of a better word), to some extent. Jodie Whittaker's Doctor wasn't, IMO. And she's a fantastic actor; if they'd wanted to write her as a believable, admirable, interesting Doctor, she'd have risen to that, I'm sure.
And it's not that a woman can't play that character — I thought Jo Martin and the way her Doctor was written were very good, and I wish we'd seen three seasons of her Doctor instead. It wasn't that she was "acting like a man" in some way, she was just more plausibly the same "soul" as previous incarnations, IMO.