I personally blame TBBT and the MCU for making nerd "culture" like D&D popular . Which is as shame since i'll all ways wanted to get into D&D.
*edit spelling*
I think a lot of it is simply because in our highly digital age the idea of games without any screens involved is an intriguing novelty, same reason there's been such a resurgence in board games in recent years.
But SJWs colonizers are always out there waiting to latch onto anything popular and try to turn it into a avenue for social justice.
I think part of the explanation for why it's become part of the SJW-polyamory-dangerhair complex is that the recent board game fad brought them in. Boardgame cafes are now pretty basic bitch-tier and present in a lot of cities, but in the mid 2000s onward you started seeing a lot more indie boardgame developers coming up with niche games with questionable balancing, gameplay, and replayability, all to fulfill a gimmick. Similarly games like Settlers of Catan have exploded and become basic bitch-tier when once they were pretty obscure. 25 years ago, to be into non-roleplaying boardgaming you had to be prepared to shell out a decent amount of money to import games from Europe, either that or play whatever rehashed 1950s offering Parkers Bros was putting out like the millionth edition of Monopoly. Lots of people saw boardgames as the province of boomers, which they largely were, at least here. Stuff like Warhammer captured the consoomer market early, but there are hundreds and hundreds of perfectly good wargaming systems from the last 15 years that only get played by a few thousand people at max, and that's how some people like it -- a niche hobby played by a tight-knit community of aficionados while dodging as much of the emphasis on bullshit nerd-consoomerism as possible. Sometimes it's best when there isn't a ton of money to be made.
Meanwhile the rabble of polyamory geometric shapes, tenderqueers, dangerhairs, and all of the above started getting into very simple non-competitive games like Carcassonne because the possibility of losing is triggering to them, and they are mental children anyway. This let them branch into more elaborate, complex, and competitive games, and pretty soon it became a hipster living room hobby (I'd estimate by the late 2000s). In the early 2010s you see the first boardgame cafes pop up as trendy value-added gastropub type places. It was inevitable that these people would get into (their idea of) D&D, which is pretty rules-light, well-documented online, and has a lot of "fudge factor" for DMs to save players from shitty decisions or shitty rolls. A hardass DM from the 80s or 90s would carve a path of destruction through these people, but probably also wouldn't care to have them as players in the first place, and would likely be too much of a lifelong neckbeard to fit in with them socially. As much as a guy like Spoony/Noah Antwiler is a whiny lolcow, he was right in the points he made in a bunch of his old videos about how Wizards of the Coast promoted dumbing-down of the game in order to attract more casual players and make money off them, which is part of why older players stuck with 3.5E or even 2E. These are the casuals Wizards of the Coast always wanted to attract and they're happy to have them and pander to them now.
I don't want to rant about this too much but I find this stuff interesting (if somewhat infuriating) and I think the important part is to note the path of how these people got to tabletop gaming vs the path most other people took to tabletop gaming in the 70s and 80s. You could argue that the people who got to it through pulp fantasy like Dragonlance weren't much better, but the 80s was a very different time. I don't think people ever complained about things that happened in major contemporary fantasy series like Wheel of Time the way they did about stuff like Game of Thrones, because fandom-ism, shipping characters, trashy fan fiction, and all that stuff didn't really exist then, it came about mostly on the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s. Most of these SJW players are kids who grew up on Twilight and Harry Potter and it turned their brains to mush before they even hit puberty. Sad.