Not really sure why this is making the rounds now, it’s not something that is a recent change.
The actual changes to the coding standards are true. The outrage is just ridiculous.
No. The document that is referenced is the Coding Standards that Epic uses for it’s own development of the engine. There are no requirements that anyone else follow those standards for anything they are writing or games that they publish with using the engine. Even publishing your game on the Epic Game Store doesn’t involve a review of code that this would apply to.
Caveat One: If you do pull requests through github to try and get a change made to the Engine, that change is expected to conform to Epic’s coding/style guide.
Caveat Two (maybe?): When publishing plugins to the market place, you may have to follow those guidelines but I’m not sure. I don’t recall ever hearing about any sort of code/blueprint review to put anything in the marketplace but it depends on those specific terms.
In most cases, the sorts of things that this is calling out usually make for better names by recognizing wording that only works for a specific cultural norm (which may or may not also be harmful).
Epic’s not really breaking any ground here. There has been a general push in the last 5-10 years to move away from words like “blacklist”, “whitelist”, “master” & “slave” across the tech industry. Epic just happens to be a highly visible step in that direction.