It's not helped that the Mods became power hungry, amoral suddenly Woke tyrants either.
If it'd not been woke philosophy, it would have been something else.
All the drama of an Off Topic section leads to people hitting the report button for anything and everything, which begs for rules, which have gaps in them so are followed by rulings, and the tiniest ideological slant one way causes lots of its supporters to flood in from across the internet, dragging it further that way, and so on.
It could as easily have been communist or fascist or christian or whatever. On rpg.net it's wokesterism, on bodybuilding.com it's 8chan lite, and so on. Once an Off Topic section was allowed to dominate the site, some ideology or other was bound to take control. That's just the nature of online discourse.
An Off Topic section works alright here because it's a minority of the site as a whole, and it's tightly controlled by arbitrary whim. If it were allowed to grow it'd dominate the site and we'd become as retarded as rpg.net or bodybuilding.com, just with a different ideological slant.
If two people both like topic X, but argue over Y, then the likelihood of their getting along depends on how much they talk about X vs Y. I have gaming friends with whom I would not get along with terribly well if we talked about non-gaming subjects. Indeed, we might need a moderator for our discussions, and rules, lest we come to blows. When we stick to gaming we're fine.
Likewise fitness and other topics I'm interested in. Which is why any Off Topic section being allowed to dominate a discussion forum will ultimately fuck it all up. We're brought together by our love of gaming, and pushed apart by other things: which should we focus on discussions on?
It's not the wokesterism, as retarded as that is. It's having Off Topic sections dominate things. It never goes well. Never.
Note: I have been removed as a mod at bodybuilding.com. No reason was given, but I had previously clashed with the admins (who moaned self-pityingly just as much as Applecline et al) saying that really we'd be better off getting rid of the Misc (off topic) section, which probably didn't help. Who's left to mod? Those in favour of the Misc, and those who swing alt-right. And so the site continues on its journey to being 8chan lite.
Being a moderator is not a difficult job, but you can make it more difficult for yourself than it need be by letting your Off Topic section dominate the site.