Stanford is a university. One of the most well known. Universities set the general tone in many areas of life (through tuition, scholarship, participation of professors and students in public discourse, and so on), and what they have as "internal guidelines" serve to legimatize and broadcast such guidelines and the need for such guidelines outside of it too.
If not for anything else, for the obvious reason that the very role of a university is to teach and shape the minds of young, impressionable, people.
It's exactly a university that should promote free speech, and be above mass hysteria about words. They can very well have internal guidelines of some terms to be avoided - just not silly ones that show a total giving in to BS.
And of course, we can stick to a narrow reading of this, and see it as an isolated, unrelated to anything, list of internal guidelines, or we can see it as part of a general trend of something seen everywhere, and discuss that.
What I see is the Stanford IT department’s internal guidelines on language that should be avoided on its own internal websites and code.
I feel like the anti-woke pendulum has reached its apex. Musk seems to be infected with the same “mind virus” he decrys, and increasingly the murderous Morality Police are lurking behind the style guides of academic IT departments. Where I could agree that the whole woke movement was getting out of hand, the reaction is going just as hard in the other direction now.