It's becoming increasingly common.

Personally I think esoteric pronouns like "ve" are a silly idea that won't catch on, but I like the idea of using "they" as a gender neutral way to refer to one or more people.

It's a straightforward expansion of the current usage: as a gender neutral way to refer to two or more people.

My problem with "they" is that it's overloading the plural pronoun and using it like a singular. This can cause confusion, for example, it makes the comment we're discussing a bit hard to read when in one sentence "they" means Manning and in the next sentence "they" means the government.

Singular they goes back centuries[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage

You mean they're making the third person work more like the second person? However shall we survive the chaos

i think it's only odd to some because of prescriptive "style guide" insistence over the years. it makes a great deal of sense.