It's better than bleen I suppose.

Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.

I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?

Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.

This one in particular is going to be difficult to get good results. Depending on your era you may have been eaten by a grue at some point.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

"grue" has a specific meaning in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction

I have been eaten by many of those.