I have made several blog posts about the math popularizer and youtuber Matt Parker and how he has got a very bad case of "they-pronoun fetish", which he contracted some time in the late 2019. Since then he has been on a more or less active quest to make "they" the standard "gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun".
Rather obviously, he isn't the only person doing this, of course. He most likely didn't come up with that idea (ie. to try to spread that notion by using that pronoun in that manner everywhere), it's likely someone talked him into it, and rather obviously he isn't the only person who has been thus talked into doing it.
I recently came across this YouTube video about the concept of "second-person perspective video games" by some smaller youtuber (56k subscribers as of writing this). The author talks a lot about the concepts of "first person", "second person" and "third person", and what those could mean in video games.
I noticed that during the entire 19-minute video he never utters the words "he" nor "she" (nor any of their inflected forms). Not once. He quite literally seems to pretend that those words do not exist.
In fact, at one point he goes through the three possible singular perspectives and says this:
"The point of language itself is to share information from one person to another. We need a 'first person' who is going to be the one talking, but they are not talking to themselves, they are talking to a 'second person' who is receiving the information. When the first person is talking about themselves, they use the pronouns 'I', 'myself', 'mine'. When talking about the second person directly, they use the pronouns 'you', 'yourself', 'your'. But what if we want to talk about someone who is not involved in the conversation? That's the 'third person', and we use the pronouns 'they', 'themselves', 'their'."
Never mind his use of "they" when referring to those people. Note particularly that last part: He pretends that "they" is the only pronoun to refer to a third person. He makes no mention whatsoever of "he" nor "she". Not here, not anywhere else in the video. At all. Not even once. He is literally talking like "they" is the one and only pronoun to refer to a third person, period. He is not merely using it that way himself, he is outright stating it.
Rather obviously, and unsurprisingly, he uses "they" when referring eg. to male characters, for example:
"Think about how you describe watching a movie to a friend: 'I just watched the Mario movie. In it, Mario drove on Rainbow Roads and then they fought Bowser in New York.'"
The fact that he refers to Mario as "they" isn't surprising at all by that point in the video, but it's quite remarkable how he seems to pretend that there exists no other pronoun to refer to a third person like that. It's almost like he is trying to erase the words "he" and "she" from existence.
This goes a step beyond what Matt Parker has been doing for the last five years.
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