Yes, this is a very weird development for a millennial like me. I think this is a GenZ/Gen Alpha thing born out of steep surveillance enforced by the policies of streaming services chatrooms and TikTok. It really seems like the younger generation has really kowtoked to advertisers and self censor words I would consider benign. It honestly disgusts me.
Not necessarily, it's desirable for articles to be accessible from work and corporate firewalls, and lists of banned words exist. This was already the case before streaming services or TikTok existed.
Those are, as I undersand, mostly TikTok-isms (designed around actual and perceived TikTok censorship) more than generational patterns that have escaped (but somewhat attenuated) to other contexts ("unalive" is particularly common in other social media, the rest not so much.)
Its substituting a job you can't talk about without risking repercussions on some platforms with one you can. I don't think its a lot deeper than that, and that the substitution is essentially arbitrary (though I do think it was chosen because it has an extreme opposite social valence, with accountant being among the jobs with the most laced-up, boring, vanilla perception available.)