[inasmuch]

I often find myself on the extreme end in favor of gatekeeping.

I more or less quit playing D&D because of what I perceive as a significant shift in the culture around the game over the last decade. It's all well and good to say the way a new wider audience interacts with something I love needn't affect the way I do, but in my experience, it's rarely avoidable (especially when that something requires others). I don't spend much energy resenting the Stranger Things, et al.-inspired D&D community (perhaps because I myself was never /that/ deep into it, all things considered), but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel alienated by the attitudes you're rightly describing as ill-suited to the game.

I feel like the centralization of the social side of internet has fostered the notion that all exclusivity is a form of hostility. Which, sure, exclusion is often a form of aggression, but it's just as often a form of defense. If someone would like to frame defense of something he considers sacred as hostile behavior against those who might want to change it, fine, but to then insist that any such action is inherently bad at best makes him seem myopic and at worst makes me wonder why he feels entitled to full read-and-write access to everything.

Maybe this is a stretch, but I find it ironic that the anti-gatekeeping attitude has risen among people who are largely sensitive to the concerns of, say, communities suffering from gentrification.

[nmz]

I don't think exclusion in this case is a form of aggression or anything emotional, the problem is not emotional based but logical based, the main culprit is categorization. If you call something X and nobody can tell its X, then its clearly not X. This is not a bad thing, its just new, and as so, should have a new name (or recategorization).