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I feel like you may be projecting a lot of meaning into it. To some extent all groups do this. I work in data science and boy let me tell you, buzzwords come into vogue so fast it makes your head spin. Famously kids often invent new vocab or participate in language trends on purpose to signal ingroup status and awareness, but adults do it too, and not exclusively politically. It’s not usually deliberate, it’s life.
It’s also inconsistent that you think that re-introducing a previously more rare word dumbs down language. Isn’t an expanded vocabulary usually a sign of higher level language, not lower? It’s not as if “legislator” or “senator” or what have you are less popular or obsolete, much less low status to say.
Don’t get me wrong: focus group messaging firms do impact political word choice. I can even name drop one (though a Republican): Frank Luntz. But they don’t always work, and don’t always show up. He pushed for energy exploration instead of oil drilling in a 2003 memo, and climate change instead of global warming in a 2002 memo, but as far as I can see, neither actually wholly replaced the other and although the choice might signal something, it’s not so obvious. In fact climate change actually got adopted by the left!
A sort-of peer of his on the left, the don’t think about an elephant guy George Lakoff, pushed stuff like climate crisis/emergency instead, and public option vs government healthcare, and stuff like that. Not all were so enduring. Yes, the 2016-2023 era had a decent amount of leftist word policing of “bad” words, but that’s not related or analogous to this objection at all. Your radar is misfiring.
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