I purposefully keep my spaces open because I like the feeling. I like not having every inch of my house not need something in it.

I like to think of it like goldfish. A goldfish will grow to be the size of the tank you put it in, and that's good for a goldfish, but I don't want to be a goldfish - I don't need to jam stuff into every corner of the house just because a corner happens to be kind of empty.

Someone who jumped to this conclusion was probably looking for a conclusion to their preconceived theory.

That or they are making a joke to dunk on people who do that

no it's legit. i'm male and i've had women do this to me when they come over to my place. more than once.

a lot of people have awful expectations/low opinions of the other sex and get super angry at you if you don't live up to their low expectations of them

you think the home thing is bad? try being a dude who is emotionally open and honest. every lady says she wants that, but the vast majority of them are totally repulsed by it. i even had a couple of girlfriends who were so convinced men are all therapy needing emotionally student idiots, that when i was try to communicate they would just ignore everything i said and then tell me how i really felt. because my words didn't register as legitimate to them, they were women, and they knew the truth about how all men can't really properly express their feelings and clearly what I was doing was fake/false/wrong or something. it was utterly insane.

people are really really really wedded to their beliefs about gender roles and gender behaviors, to the point of total delusion that when someone doesn't live up to their sexist expectations, they just reject the evidence in front of their face and make up a fake story to maintain the preexisting belief.

tl;dr: all men are emotional student idiots. if there is a man who isn't, he's not really a man, he's secretly gay. because gay men aren't men either, or something? i dunno.