I recall lots of unicode obfuscators were popular turning letters to similar looking symbols to bypass filters/censors when the forum/websites didn't filter unicode and filters were simple.
Leetspeak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet), and similar things obfuscating letters with numbers/ punctuation/ symbols (or subsequently, obfuscated with Unicode or lookalikes).
Now experiencing a renaissance on YouTube et al. to legitimately refer to terms like murder, suicide etc. which will typically get a channel or user demonetized/banned/blocked by internal search engines/etc.
Exactly. So many words are being "censored". As if "k*ll" does not make us think of "kill" or something. I do not see how it helps or solves anything. It is absurd to me.