On your view, what work is "gender" doing besides preconceived notions?
For example, what's the difference between la biblioteca and el biblioteca? Libraries don't have human genders (regardless of whether "gender" is meant to pick out biological sex or social gender). It's not clear I could conceivably say "that library has a gender", but if I could whatever I'm saying doesn't actually affect the library, does it? If I look at the library and say "it's male" and someone else (deeply confused) looks at it and says "it's female" it doesn't matter; we're both deeply confused.
Maybe you're working with authorial intent here; whether a writer likes or not they might "write" a transformer as male "without trying." I suppose this makes sense, but canonically transformers have always had explicit genders. WHAT that means hasn't been explicitly explored, apart from the fact that practically all instances of transformer creation has been asexual budding (from cybertron, from each other, from the matrix, etc.)
I'm not a fan of "fiction is a human construct" as an excuse to get out of critically evaluating fictional worldbuilding. (I understand what you're getting at, but it's discussing fiction as fiction, rather than engaging with the fictional world. Both are philosophically interesting, but when I ask "Why does X happen in fiction?" I'm asking about the fictional world, not how the fictional world was written... in most cases.)
Extra-fictionally, Star Trek aliens looks like humans with junk glued to their head because it is cost effective; but in fiction, Star Trek aliens often look like humans because they're all related due to aliens seeding other planets with life.
Extra-fictionally, many science fiction aliens are gendered male/female because we human beings are gendered male/female; but in fiction that's not the answer. One option, and arguably the one that's most supported by many fictions, is that transformers are genderless robots who have taken on a truly social gender - one that corresponds with either physical or social genders of alien species who transformers interact with and/or were created to interact with.
However, extra fictionally physical sexual gender has evolutionary advantages, and this is true in fiction as well. So while most fictions have depicted asexual reproduction of one form or another, transformer sexual reproduction (rare or not) would be a reasonable way to explain gender & romantic relationships (rare or not). Gender as physical sexual gender has more explanatory power than gender as mimicking others. Of course this isn't to say that Transformers can't or wouldn't have "cultural" gender or "social role" gender; but in the real world such things are - at best - nuanced in a way that it's difficult to put into fiction aimed at children.
In the real world, of course, some people identify as gender as other than their physical sexual characteristics (whether genetic or expression) due to perceived social (often cultural) gender roles, but this strikes me as problematic; saying you're [female] because you sit most of the [female gender stereotypes] seems problematic in two ways: (1) rather than recognize the stereotype as a stereotype, it seems to treat the stereotype as a definition - effectively a part-whole fallacy see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/ & (2) seems to be inconsistent with how people who use the stereotypical language would use the term.
Better late than never.
You're right here. Obviously "I can transform into anything I want and I scanned a bajillion options so I'm prepared" is preferable to "I can only transform into a garbage truck" in the same way DC's The Flash's running ability is better than mine - IE, he can run really fast and I can't.
The problem, of course, is that ROTB Mirage really should have transformed into a tank or a jet or whatever. Why fly in Stratosphere when everyone can just take a jet alt mode and fly on their own? Because ROTB transformers are "too powerful" then there's no way for writers to convincingly write them consistently.
The best example of this is Star Trek Discovery, where in S1+2, it could teleport anywhere at any time with no drawback, and S3+ everyone had personal transporters that they used instead of... you know... opening the door (probably because it's filmed on green screen and opening the door animation costs more than teleportation animation...). The writers gave the crew of the Discovery so much unprecedented future technology that nothing was a coherent threat. "There's this bad guy OVER THERE that we need you to find. Okay, black alert, we're there. Done. We need you to destroy a whole alien species. Don't worry, Bad Rick Sanchez just built us a genocidal war crime in a lunch box. And he didn't even need a box of scraps like Tony Stark."
All else being equal, you need to explain why Optimus Prime doesn't transform into a jet plane when he needs to fly. Him being too lazy is a bad explanation. Him being unable to, because only Teletran One or a similar ancient computer can do this, and even then not easily IS a good explanation. Even if you want your characters to be able to scan new alt modes on the fly, it's probably a good idea to give this limits... it takes a lot of energon; they need a cool down period, etc.
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