The term didn’t really take off and become weaponized, however, until the growing resentment of “outsiders” and indie games that would culminate in Gamergate, after which it was retroactively applied with vitriol to games released much earlier like Dear Esther (originally 2008) and To the Moon (2011) (Clark 2017).
People have ideas of what a game should be engrained in their minds and it creates these types of backlashes from uniqueness and difference from the "social norm." Addressing alternative ideas in game should be seen in a respect of art rather than negatively.