Mainly due to anonymity and lack of consequences. As the public becomes less and less tolerant of these words, pressure to moderate such behaviour has increased.
That stuff has been scrubbed out of text communication in multiplayer games for ages now, and I think it'll be forcibly removed from voice communication with increasing frequency soon.
It is right now, in a few games you can report people for using slurs in voice chat at which point it's saved for review. In some cases the reporter gets some kind of reward for actioned reports.
However, this is only in the largest games. Gaming is now one of if not the most valuable media industries out there and only growing, however there are still a lot of niche games where either for cultural or demand reasons there's zero interest in censorship. Go check Wargame Red Dragon global chat for instance.
Sure. But there's always been dark alleys where people freely said things that respectable memebers of society would lose their jobs for saying.
That doesn't mean that those words aren't curse words. In fact, it's a sign that they are curse words. It wouldn't be so edgy to say them if they weren't so heavily frowned upon by "polite society"
Oh to be clear I'm not arguing that they're not curse words at all, in fact the increased censorship in high profile spaces like popular video games is evidence they are curse words.
That stuff has been scrubbed out of text communication in multiplayer games for ages now, and I think it'll be forcibly removed from voice communication with increasing frequency soon.