Its thanks to this kind of thinking (probably less overt and obnoxiously obvious in the past, but still there) that you had seemingly all of film (hays code), television (the television code), and comics (comics code authority) media at varying points in time inexplicably go out of their way to stop being even slightly enjoyable and non preachy solely because a tiny group of malcontent REEEEE mongers were able to trick the relevant execs into thinking that not doing what they said would destroy the industry, while kowtowing would lead to greater profits from the "it totally exists guiz" silent majority of joyless christian eunuchs that were the only ones who could stomach the crap that got churned out.
There are more examples than can be counted of executives then meddling in films and tv and comics in order to make them more "family friendly" or "christian" or "removing obscenity" by all kinds of hilariously absurd means ...which unfortunately one of the better sauces for right now is the
TV tropes page on the hays code and its page on the
comic code. Sorry, couldnt be arsed to find a more dignified source.
However, since movies and TV and comics were profitable as hell because there was fucking nothing else to do for 99% of people at the time, even if the media was boring mush, creative types were still able to shimmy around these restrictions either by subtle mastery of the craft to bend the rules to their utmost in order to become more memorable and well made.......or just straight up exploitation films that displayed all the forbidden shit people wanted to see but were bookended with a "WHAT YOU JUST SAW WAS TOTALLY BAD SO....DONT DO IT OR YOU WILL GO TO HELL AND GET RAPED BY HITLER!" moral ending.
In the end these codes were unsustainable and fell away, but the underlying idea of "start a moral crusade, convince important people it represents everyone in the world, and then use this to bully them into compliance and have them add you and your friends to the payroll" never went away, either in america (where an attempted resurgence of them started in the 80s) or elsewhere like britain (where a
successful resurgence of them started in the 80s and lasted into the early 2000s with the "video nasty" shit) or australia (see the violent vidya laws to this day), which brings us to now.
Nowadays things are in some ways the same as when the hays code was implemented, with a nice lil age of relatively free expression with disinterested corporate indifference coming to a violent end with the moral crusade against all things problematic convincing higher ups in media corporations that bowing down and pandering to them and paying their friends to run things is the only way they can hope to survive being boycotted by every darkie and minority on the planet.