I don't care about this general topic, but no, its defnitely more work to add beards to new faces than removing the option completely. You would only need to hide the part of the UI not even deactivating it. As someone who does character models for living, believe me the amount of work per face to add beards is significant - might be aliviated a bit if the engine can morph automatically assets to faces, but that's not a given - and in cases where its not a given its hours of work - each beard for each face needs to be morphed, skinned, exported and setup in the engine - not to mention if bugs/art direction force you to go back and change a beard.
They're already there - so if it was extra work before it would still be just more extra work to remove them afterward.
That's assuming that neither new faces will be added nor new beards. While the beard selection is quite broad (it could use a couple more options), the head selection definitely isn't. Again - every new head needs every beard adjusted.
Removing them is telling the UI to use the elf's UI that doesn't have a beard selection. Probably 15-30min of work - less work than adding a single beard to a single face.
But I'm not arguing to remove them. Just setting the expectations correctly when it comes to workload. I absolutely don't care if females can use beards. If Larian has the time for it (or if they are lucky enough to have a fast morphing tool in their engine), why not? I would probably argue to add it for Elves as well before arguing to remove it (although its not cannon, but bearded female's ain't that common either I would say).
