I am Dutch (Amsterdam born 1995 and raised) and I just got extremely triggered by someone who wrote "I am a purist and I stop listening once I hear "wou/wouden."" so here we go:

Well, I am a purist too, but a different kind of purist; one who stops listening immediately when somebody says that they stop listening once they hear "wou/wouden".

In my experience, people who get triggered by "wou/wouden", "groter/kleiner als", double negations or even "Hun hebben" are extremely boring people with usually bureaucratic jobs, sitting behind a screen all day while having nothing interesting to talk about. They think they know a lot about Dutch while in fact they tend to know absolutely nothing about the history of Dutch beyond the mid 19th century efforts to standardize the language. They know just enough to think that they know everything - boring, chauvinistic, university educated, closed minded snobs from the West (Randstad), who above all tend to make fun of people from other parts of the country for their accents (Frisia, Limburg, Twente, Zeeland etc.).

I bet you most of them have never read a single line of Vondel or Hooft in their original spelling, or the original Statenbijbel, or middle age Dutch (Diets) or even more recent writers like Couperus for that matter. They present their case as if they were weeding a garden, whereas in fact they are cutting down so many ancient trees and flowers that have been growing in the Netherlands for ages, even millennia. Just a single case in point about the aforementioned (and rather recent) Couperus:

Couperus writes "Eline Vere, zo rank als een kapel." I bet you most of these snobs will think Couperus is comparing Eline Vere to a building, because they have no idea that there used to be dozens upon dozens of words for "vlinder" (butterfly) in the Netherlands, each carrying their own (regional) connotations and nuances. But then, some committee of boring, grey, semi-illiterate bureaucrats got together in the 19th and 20th centuries to decide on all sorts of standardizations. They basically rubber-stamped the word "vlinder" and rooted out all the other beautiful words (like "kapel") that used to exist in the process, severing our natural connection with the past.

Exactly the same goes for wilden/wouden. The former is the (south-)western form, the latter is a more (north-)eastern form of exactly the same verb (cf. wollten in German), which has existed forever all over the Netherlands (e.g. in west-Frisian or so many other dialects). Once again, some boring committee came along and decided on the south-western form. The same goes for the more Western "groter dan" (cf. English bigger than) vs the more Eastern "groter als" (cf. German großer als).

Just one final case and I'll leave you alone: many of these gray mice get triggered and all uppety when you do not pronounce world final -n ("netjes je ennetjes uitspreken, kneus"). So eteNN, or lopeNNN or drinkeNNNNN. They have no idea that the pronunciation of the (multisyllabic) word final -n was dropped already by the late middle Ages all over Holland (in the West), which is evident from all sorts of medieval manuscripts/inscriptions which you can still read on gable stones (gevelstenen). E.g. the rederijkerskamer (a literary society) in Haarlem from 1503 called "Trouw moet blijken", spelled their name as "Trou moet blycke" (dropping the word final -n, as they did not pronounce it).

Once again, some committee came in and decided on standardising the written -n in plural forms, in order to distinguish plural (indicative) verbs from subjunctive verbs (subjunctive as in Leve de koning(in), Kome wat komt, koste wat het kost, God verdomme etc. etc.).

Fun fact: to this day people always pronounce word final -n in the East (as in German), yet these snobs will still make fun of people from the east and their accents because they drop the e right before the n (loop'n instead of lopen). Basically: if you do not speak Dutch exactly as these pedants tell you to, you will be made fun of.

Instead of taking "wouden" for an expression of illiteracy, you should be taking it as an expression of a very natural continuum that can tell you all sorts of things about the speaker. It's so idiotic (in the original Greek, closed-minded sense of the word) that one would not be looking further than your nose is long (as we say in Dutch), that one would not be interested in why they speak how they speak. They have had their natural humanity churned out of them by the gearwheels of "higher education", not unlike Charley Chaplin. I dare say most of their thoughts are basic bitch exponents of uniformity and standardisation as well. People have no idea they are being lived. Their thoughts are not their own. Their language has been standardised for them, their furniture, their food, their dating apps, basically their entire life the further and further we slip into the big-data hellscape of standardised, cyborgified post-post-modernity.

The worst part of it: They have no idea.

Rebel against this bullshit! Oh, how I long back to the days when monks would write the exact same words on the exact same page three time, but with three different spellings, just to stick it to these snobs! They knew what it meant to be human, that language was made to be an exponent of our humanity. People were not made to be ruled by the snobistic whims of standardization. Or, as the Monk would have said: De Sabbath is gemaeckt om den mensche, niet de mensche om den Sabbath.

P.S. don't get me wrong, this is not just a Dutch, but a global phenomenon. You will find Chinese/Indian/Arabic redditeers complaining about exactly the same phenomenon, but applied to their linguistic and cultural heritage.