[slothtrop]

> for most people being cancelled definitely entails some sort of deplatforming, e.g. some BigCo not wanting to be associated with your name.

Who's counting? It's trivial to find examples of people who've lost their jobs for innocuous reasons. See: David Shor. It's bad faith to pretend this doesn't happen. Usually for proponents or those denying the phenomenon exists the goalpost shifts to effectively shrugging it off as minor. Speech that begets consequences isn't strictly limited to bigotry, as we are told.

> someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG.

He couldn't, until he could. It's not necessarily the case that public shunning lasts forever. Disingenuous to construe what happened to that man as something entirely different to what "cancellation" colloquially refers to.