Please engage on a substantive level. I look forward to learning about the positive aspects of using “felon” to refer to a person.
"Felon" allows everyone to know what "node" of the vocab network you just jumped into.
Given that “felon” means “person that’s been convicted of a felony at some point in their life” and the fact that “felony” covers such a wide variety of crimes, it is a genuinely useless indicator of context.
Jump too quickly into arguing for hyper-specific contexts bringing meaninglessness to colloquial, general contexts is a surefire way to signal to counterparties you are unwilling to play the negotiation-over-contexts games necessary for smooth conversation with most people generally.