I’m kinda surprise people react so strongly to stylistic guidelines of an academic institution.

It’s stated clearly that the initiative applies to “Stanford websites and code.”, so they’re not declaring new rules for the world, they’re telling their very select community to avoid a set of words in writing.

To answer your point, no, I don’t think they’re trying to make sure no one gets offended ever again.

It’s because a segment of our population is fighting a culture war and these sorts of lists are like atomic bombs dropped by their enemy (the work, educated left)

Are we pretending this phenomenon is strictly relegated to stylistic guidelines of academia? Be serious.

That's what I thought 5 years ago, that these kind of things are just restricted to select communities. Now my workplace has a bot that yells at you if you put the words "dummy value" into your code. The current list of banned terms is small enough that it's not a huge burden, but if we get to a point where there's 50 or 100 niche subcultural heresies that I have to keep in mind when I'm coding, that's going to severely impact how productive I can be.

“niche subcultural heresies” is quite a description.

I also kinda see why a company wouldn’t want a “dummy message” popup accidentally appearing in production when someone forgot to remove the debug code before the release.

In all my workplaces, these kind of productivity impacting initiatives had a consulting and consensus taking period to make sure we’d either be on board or at least understanding of the underlying logic and why it’s put in place. If you still feel it’s a dumb move going in the wrong direction, I feel for you for the potential stream of decisions that as you point out, won’t probably go in the direction you wish for.