I’ll say that it’s a lot easier to avoid contentious terms when they don’t affect you personally. For example, if you are a middle-class heterosexual white man living in the US, then it’s a low-stakes choice to avoid talking about patriarchy, institutional racism, heteronormativity, sexism, etc.

The terms are partly contentious due to their connotations but these are contentious topics to talk about in the first place. If you’re going to dance around the most obvious and natural term for a concept that you’re talking about, it ends up sounding suspicious.