This trend seems to have started with the advent of restrictive social media, especially TikTok, which deem these topics too hot to deal with and will reduce the reach of videos and their associated creators who bring these topics up. To avoid being penalized by the platforms, the creators on those platforms have shifted to self-censoring to circumvent the automated filters which are not set up to detect the new, non-standard spellings.

Over time, these non-standard spellings and other types of self-censorship have made their way into societal discourse, with many people utilizing the non-standard spellings outside the platform where self-censorship was actually necessary. The people who do this - who are not content creators and who are not posting to a restrictive platform - purportedly do it because they want to avoid triggering people, even though it is not useful towards that goal.

I have never been on TikTok nor do I know how the internet works, but the explanation which seems to clear Occam's razor most easily is that they do it that way because they grew up with it. There is now an entire generation that grew up with TikTok being in their life ever since they could think. On that platform, such self-censorship is standard and violators were not visible because the platform hides or removes incriminating posts. Most of their exposure to such topics will have happened on that platform, and then that's also where they get their words (or non-words) from.

In general, self-censorship like that strikes me as immature. Censoring the word distances yourself from the word and places a Value Judgement on the word. Whatever the word is, it's bad. Keyword is “prejudice”.
Doing that signals to me that the person is unable to seperate themselves from their emotions about the word, that they see it strictly through a lense of social prohibition and are unable to step back from that, ie. have a proper discussion about it. The person is not able to look the problem square in the eye.

Of course, when I say “it signals”, I mean that it signals something to me. As always, with signals, it's just a signal and it's perfectly possible that the signal is wrong. In fact, for anything that is true, you can always find signals that seem to contradict the truth.
What I mean to say is that even if a person self-censors, it does not mean that they cannot have good discussions about problems.
Either way, I personally discourage to skirt around words. It is unhelpful and hurts conversation. Or, to say it positively, I encourage using the correct words for the correct things to promote open, scientific discussions about our problems. We have problems, it is okay for us to have problems, we have to address these problems and find working, practical solutions based on the data and knowledge available to us.