Devs don't need tips on how to deal with this. Just make the game you want to make. These woke social media warriors aren't going to buy your products and nor do they play games. They just want control of the medium. So just do what you want to do and ignore them.
It seems utterly insane that games seems to be the only media/artform these days that had such big input from outside pressures and actively change their products based on the whims of a small amount of people.
I've never heard of a traditional artists bowing to fans to please them - you just present your art and if they like it they like it. The moment you start trying to tailor it to everyone is the moment you loose coherence of your own voice / vision and it becomes a goddamn mess and people can sense when you've sold out your own artistic morals. They just can.
Movies don't have this problem (for the most part - Reshoots are expensive as fuck when it costs thousands a day to pay actors and crew) and I suspect it's because they keep development quite secretive to not spoil things. Back in the day Games were the same. You didn't have as much engagement via social media for studios aside from maybe small interviews in magazines but even then it was mostly game tips/game reviews and not much about the studio behind it. You just eagerly waited to see if your fave game was gonna get a sequel and were pleasantly surprised or you saw the boxart at the store and were intrigued enough to buy it.
I feel like every single game nowadays has a FB and a Twitter and a website and a discord and blah blah blah. They don't need this. Put out your trailer - don't talk about your development and release your game when it's done and market appropriately then let it speak for itself and don't talk to anyone. You don't need someone's goddamn Twitter input on anything. Because it adds nothing. If Games wanna stop the root cause of a small handful of people (and unscrupulous game journos) then stop engaging people so much on every platform. Just shut up about your cool game and make it - don't crow about it. Because you're inviting vultures to pick apart your game until every integral aspect of it is gone and it's a shitty shell of what you set out to make.
Teamwork is super important. Having a good team who is able to work to gether and be on the same page is super important. Take Blizzard North for example, that team was the heart and soul of good Blizzard games. They got rid of them and Blizzard hasn't made a single good game since.
I don't see how this runs counter to my point though. I guess you are trying to say because some compromises have to made that means there isn't any vision or passion? I don't think that's true. And even if it were, it's not nearly the same as pandering to an audience.
Your voice could be a team voice, obviously. But I was using the singular as the example. Also those people on a team are working on a cohesive project together - some asshole on Twitter who thinks your game box art is bad because it has a WHITE MAN and wants it changed? Doesn't contribute Jack shit to your project and should be rightly ignored.
Being pissy fills the woke crowd with a sense of power and authority. It grants them agency in their otherwise mundane lives. Why on Earth would they exchange that for something as transitory as an apology?
