You'd end up with pages of options, especially once people realize they can get on the bandwagon.

Disable swears, alcohol, smoking, marijuana, gambling, child abuse and neglect, sensitive East Asian politics, sensitive Middle Eastern politics, WWII politics, Late Ottoman genocides, LGB issues, T issues, HOA issues, vegetarian issues, vegan issues...

You really don’t need to get that granular.

That’s a silly exaggeration. You’re literally just saying “there shouldn’t be a user toggle because developers have no self-control for stopping at one toggle”.

To which the obvious counterargument is just “well of course they can stop at just one toggle. That’s not an excuse to have zero toggles”.

There's a story about the Microsoft Word team. I'm not sure it's true, but here goes:

The team had heard that most customers only use 5% of Word's copious feature set, and as part of some rewrite the team set about finding out what the 5% were.

And it was most of the feature set. Customer A used these 5%, B these others...

It's easy to say just one option without describing exactly what that should do. L10n raises some questions, for example. Or just two options, or three. Much harder if you want to be specific.

We aren’t talking about completely disparate types of functionality. We are talking about enabling or disabling very narrow categories of words from literally one feature.

The store you mentioned wasn’t about exclusions from each and every dictionary. It was about tools that do entirely unique things.

I think you're saying that it's possible that Apple can add the option you want and go on stonewalling other people's requests for other options. Right?

I'm saying the opposition against having an option is "what if people want more options?" is silly and unproductive.

Do you make the same argument for everything?

"You shouldn't treat yourself to a takeaway because what if you want more takeaways?"

"You shouldn't buy a car because what if you want more cars?"

etc.

iOS has been steadily offering more options over time. And yes taken individually customization seems like the correct choice basically every time but eventually you end up with a mess.

Consider the logic for tap’s could offer hundreds of customizations. That’s core functionality and I’m sure someone internally is thinking deeply about many of them. But if you offer zero customization most people just get used to how things operate so skipping that functionality isn’t terrible for the average user. Instead they offer options for people with disabilities which is a distinct group who can’t just adapt and thus a meaningful justification.

Disabling the “predictive” feature entirely or allowing predictions based exclusively on what it learns from the user could work. The latter would probably be unpopular because learning from what you type sounds intrusive.

But any prediction picked by Apple without user input could be seen as Apple’s speech. If it’s suggested by Apple then they aren’t censoring you, they are censoring themselves.