The internet is turning society into a kind of "social emulsion" where everyone is their own little droplet in the fluid, but they don't merge together.
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Back in the 90s early 00s the internet made us mesh together because each one of us there was a specific person. We had forum signatures and every single post was clearly made by a person, for a person.
Then social media took over and relegated every single person into a tiny unidentifiable avatar next to a non-prominent name, not unlike NPCs in CRPGs.
In turn this has been exploited by the powers that be to ensure the social glue gets even weaker: a society barely held together won't revolt. There's only one thing left to do: productivity, productivity, productivity.
The political opponent is no longer a person. Just a nameless, faceless NPC (personifying everything that's wrong) spawned there to be defeated and collect their social loot tokens.
But I might just be an old fart rambling about the good, old days.
It is simply the typical effect of regression to the mean of large groups. Previously there was the illusion of meshing because the group was more homogenous. Diversity is touted as a panacea, but it actually has many deleterious effects, the most obvious being the reduction of what is deemed acceptable/normal behavior and speech.
It is not surprising that everyone looks like an NPC because bringing everyone into the fold requires a redefinition of what is considered the acceptable norm. It systematically goes through narrowing the definition to artificially create the illusion of homogeneity (necessary to reduce conflicts).
This is the same process happening to society at large. Psychology is just a replacement for religion, and the various diagnostics just serve as a tool to police what is acceptable behavior. This is very much the same thing as the various religious scriptures, using moral arguments, appeals to emotions, and enforced tribalism to promote the “correct” way to live one's life.
The endless discussion of psychologists around diagnostics is hopeless; they are just gurus replacing preachers, but instead of using gospels and mythological stories, they use pseudoscientific bullshit to categorize/label behaviors and argue for what they believe should be the norm.