That actually makes sense.

>the minority of people for whom the word itself is jarring

Are these people so upset by the word that their brains fail to parse it when one vowel is obscured? Everyone else seems to know immediately what it means without any extra cognitive effort. If they actually can't parse it, what happens then? Do they just internally shout "LALALALALALA I'M NOT READING!" and quickly carry on with the sentence before they second-guess their own sense of shame? As I said, I really get twisted up trying to imagine it.

We've all seen that thing where you can still read sentences with jumbled words as long as the first and last letters remain the same. Plus, the set of words taboo enough to censor in this way is so small that you could blank out all of the letters and I'd still be able to immediately know what was said just by the context.

EDIT: I've just realised, there is a precedent that long predates the internet: the jewish(?) practice of writing g-d instead of god. This is obviously associated with the general abrahamic thing about the name of god being forbidden which is present in islam as well.