For years, even decades now, quite many people have lamented the lack of a "gender-neutral (singular) pronoun" in the English language, and tried to make the word "they" be that word. After many decades of hard social engineering it appears that they are indeed slowly but surely succeeding in forcefully pushing it into common parlance and everyday speech. You just have to look a mere 5 to 10 years ago and almost nobody was using "they" as a "gender-neutral" singular pronoun, but nowadays you can see and hear instances of it almost constantly everywhere. This social engineering program has been so successful that even many people who are staunch and vocal opponents of "political correctness", social justice intersectional feminism and the extreme left, are starting to use it. Perhaps even without noticing.
It has been so successful, in fact, that even major dictionaries, such as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, are not only including the meaning for the word "they" as a singular "gender-neutral" third-person pronoun, but moreover including long essays to justify this definition.
(I think that it's rather telling that dictionary creators feel the need to justify adding a meaning to a word by writing long essays. I have never seen this done before in a normal dictionary that's not an actual encyclopedia. It is quite clear that the motivation behind these justifications is sociopolitical and controversial.)
Spoken languages change over time. They never remain completely static over the decades and centuries. New words are being constantly added, existing words fall out of use, and some words slowly change meaning (or gain new meanings used alongside the old ones). Sometimes a new word, or a new meaning for an existing word, is invented and added by practical necessity (eg. to describe for instance a new invention, such as a new technological device). Othertimes new words appear or old words change meaning as a natural process, where some word or new meaning gains popularity in the general speaking population (without it being forced onto that population in any way).
Sometimes this kind of new word, or adding a new meaning to an existing word, may be less natural and have more of an agenda (usually a sociopolitical agenda) behind it. A perfect example of this is the word "gay", which a hundred years ago simply meant "happy" or "festive" (over a hundred years ago it was relatively common in many English-speaking countries to use expressions like "have a gay new year"), but which over the decades was more or less artificially attached a new meaning. So successfully in the end that the old meaning has fallen completely out of use, and only the new meaning remains.
However, there's still a crucial difference between what happened to the word "gay" and what is happening with the word "they". The difference is that the new meaning of the word "gay", even though it had a sociopolitical agenda behind it, was for the most part not forced onto people. There was no compulsion or social pressure to use it. People were not punished for not using it, or using it "incorrectly". A certain segment of the population simply started using it with the new meaning, and it just eventually caught on.
Where such an artificial change to the meaning of a word becomes less justified is when not only is there a sociopolitical agenda behind it, but when there is compulsion to using it. When people, groups, entities and institutions are pressured into using it, in order to support the agenda. When there may be some kind of sociopolitical repercussions if somebody does not use it. When people and entities start using it for political purposes, to affect people, to engage in social engineering.
In other words, when the word becomes pretty much the opposite of a "taboo", ie. rather than being a forbidden word that must not be used, it becomes a mandatory word that you are compelled to use, lest you face some kind of consequences or repercussions.
This is what George Orwell referred to in his famous book as "newspeak": New words, new meanings of words, new language, invented for the express purpose of affecting society and people's thinking to push a political agenda (and with the implication that the "newspeak" is forced onto people, that there are repercussions if people do not use it, and use exclusively it.)
When major dictionaries feel the need to write long essays about why "they" has the meaning of a singular "gender-neutral" pronoun, you know that the authors are trying to justify controversial newspeak.
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