We had an extensive and wasteful discussion about this at my last company over the summer. It was absurd. The proponents of replacing every word that could potentially be offensive have this superstitious view of language as having inherent power that continues from generation to generation. They really believe that a word can carry traces of evil with it over time. Naturally there's zero science behind this.

It's a religion without forgiveness or redemption. And the high priests of this religion will never allow the language to sit they will always find new words to change and replace and shame us with.