I think it could have been avoided had two main things happened differently, one political, one technological.
The first is no Obama as President, Obama really changed the tone of the left a lot, for one thing it shined a spotlight on race in America, for another it made the left feel very emboldened, like they had "won" and could push forward any crazy shit that came to mind, they thought the Republican party was done.
Had McCain won in 2008 the left would have continued being very much like it was during the Dubya years, if Hilary had won we might have seen a lesser version of 2010s feminism, but the racial dynamic would have been completely different, things wouldn't have gone so "intersectional"
Another factor is the Great Recession, people wouldn't take shit like Marxism as seriously if the economy had never shit the bed.
The second main thing is technology related, if smart phones had never been invented and if social media had never been invented, if sites like Tumblr and Twitter were never invented, if the internet had stayed more of it's own thing as opposed to the social media driven concept of internet and your real life blending together, we wouldn't have seen these particular politics spread like they did.
I don't think it was inevitable, it was a perfect storm of just the right things happening all at once that created this Hellish situation we're in now, but the fact that that perfect storm did happen like it did makes it almost seem like it was fate.