It seems like you would lose meaning by automatically replacing words, no? Why would you want to censor your internet experience, just because you find someone else's use of language awkward?
Zwei Punkte: erstens, nein, such times are never over. Only thing that changes is who is outraged and by what.
Zweitens, you're a demonstration of this right now by caring. To be clear, I'm not criticising you for this, you're allowed to care about stuff, but you're literally promoting an extension that rewrites someone else's word choice because you don't like it. Es ist dasselbe, und ist gründlich no different to how English Sprachbewahrer complain about the split infinitive in Star Trek's "to boldly go" or common use of the phrase "very unique" (unique means one-of-a-kind, how can you be "very" that?)
> The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal.
Die deutsche Sprache ist keine constructed language like Esperanto, whose rules come from a book, it's a natural language whose rules are discovered by observing those using it. As people change what they say and how they say it, so too does language change over time.
The German language is what those using it, do. On the basis of the political adverts I see around here, this includes the conservative CDU borrowing die englische Phrase „Made in Germany“: https://www.cdu.de/aktuelles/cdu-deutschlands/mainzer-erklae...
My calculus textbook (Königsberger, 2004) in university used alternating generic masculine and feminine in its exercises, which I found a delightful use of language.
Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.
it was
Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.
and it became:
Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.
It’s insane.
Lehrer being explicitly male and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive?
I appreciate that this seems to be an emotional topic, but if people choose to use language in a new way, would it not be best to not withhold that information from you as a reader? Someone else wrote that it's like using an ad-blocker, but if I were to read an article, I would want to read it in the exact form someone wrote it, no? It's a bit like Americans auto-replacing "fucking" with "f***g" in their browsers to avoid an annoyance, but they lose information in the process.
We Germans know that the generic masculine includes both genders by default. It’s how we use the language.
(exception: Chinese didn't really bother with gendered pronouns until about the nineteenth century, due to the need to translate European languages, so some had to be introduced)
So since my youth, multiple proposal have been put forward, among which the gender-star. Lehrer -> Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen.
It was never taken seriously, until we got a left wing government (2022 or so) and since then its getting more and more used. Especially in progressive media. Some even speak it. With a short break that represents the star or :. Sounds pretty stupid, but people do it.
In my mind, its the ultimate form of virtue signalling :-)
but hey. to each their own. I just prefer to ignore it if possible
> you would lose meaning
No meaning is lost that has not been there before.
> someone else's use of language awkward
Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating.