Hi Indi, thanks for this article.
I totally follow you in your quest of empathy and I guess the approach of persona you have works well for design thinking or product creation (solve a problem), but in a lot of recent projects, I also saw the personas helping my clients target their users more efficiently using Facebook / Google ads which have become key to run a successful business online.
These age / location criterias are of great help if you want to run effective social media marketing, focusing your budget on the people who could actually be potential customers.

If you have some accurate data (let say 85% of buyers come from NY and are women), why not use them in your persona?