There have always been progressives. Look at John Brown, violently anti-racist when most of society accepted a racial caste system as normal. We should hold the past to the same standard as the present, not dismiss old problems as "of the times."
It's dumb that this story got turned into an anti-masturbation edict. Onan was pulling out because he wanted his brother's inheritance, he was punished for his greed.
Making languages is way harder than just writing a story, and fantasy isn't trying to be an accurate reflection of real world geo-social stratification. Everyone speaks the same language because it often would be a worse narrative if the characters couldn't communicate. (Not always, but plot-by-misunderstanding is at least as lazy as writing in one tongue)
There needs to be (imo) a reason beyond realism to make that part of the story. Tolkien was exceptional, but he was using different races and languages to make up a creation mythology for the UK. The history and culture and differences were arguably more important than a ring and some hobbits.
Tad Williams also made up a few languages for his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series. There they serve to make the world feel bigger, with far-off exotic lands and ancient mysteries.
Oh and you brought up swearing in your first post. De-modernizing language is way harder than it seems. Taking out "god damn" is easy, but that also links to gosh, darn, dang, "goodbye" is from God be with ye, "gossip" from god-sibling, the days of the week all reference Earth myths and have to go, "knight" doesn't make sense unless they had a French equivalent language to take words from...
Narrative shorthand is still important. Using existing accents, and leaning somewhat into stereotype, can communicate a great deal of context without spending a ton of time on fictional history. Is it lazy? Often, yes. But it works; just like shape language and color coding are useful tools for visual storytelling.
It's so established in the way we tell stories that avoiding these tropes is a deliberate subversion that can be thought-provoking or distracting.
I don't want flying cars because I don't want 95% of the people around me to be driving regular cars. Can't even use a turn signal and now they have carte blanche to drive over houses and shit?
The answer is mass transit. Mag-rail, not personal aviation.
As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work.
Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. Tracking down a driver update or patch (that you just moved to an unencrypted folder) on a dial-up connection? Re-installing your OS from a series of floppy disks because something broke, again? Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn't function on new hardware?
PC gaming was a nightmare but you put up with it because StarCraft or Quake 3 online was dope as hell, we had Diablo and Myst and Half-Life and Doom and Putt-Putt Goes to the Goddamned Moon so it was all worth it.
That's one of the reasons Mario 64 still holds up. Despite being so early in 3D platforming it did a really good job with the controls and camera choices. It's a real mixed bag to go back to that era of gaming, Generation V, but I kinda like that. There wasn't preconceived notions of what 3D games should be so they tried everything.
There have always been progressives. Look at John Brown, violently anti-racist when most of society accepted a racial caste system as normal. We should hold the past to the same standard as the present, not dismiss old problems as "of the times."