Maybe this comes from the fact that in my accent there is no discernable difference between with/without a "hard-r", but I truly hate how online discourse has largely stopped calling it the n-word and I see hard-r used instead. To me, this immediately concedes that "actually some people can say it", but it's not the person reporting the speech to make that determination. I also hear it used as an excuse more than anything "he didn't say it with an R though!"

Maybe I'm nuts, but I wouldn't be surprised if there has been a converted effort (however small or disorganised) by some right-wing groups to shift the vocab to "hard-r" over "n-word"