It's also a sign of how blind adherence to tradition causes old biases to persist and prevents any kind of progress, good or bad.

In fairness, there's a distinction to be made here between directed and undirected change.

When SJW warrior groups make campaigns that from now on some list of words has to be considered as racist, sexist, ...ist etc. I think one can talk of directed change.

..what if those words are?

At least people before did not consider them to be. This shows that proving that say are is not so easy.

Or people before didn't care if they are?