It is objectively bad when not-very-literate people guess that a rarer word means the same as a more familiar word that it sounds a bit like and drown out the p

It is objectively bad when not-very-literate people guess that a rarer word means the same as a more familiar word that it sounds a bit like and drown out the people who made a distinction. That's because it is destroying useful tools for no gain. The word used to mean X, not Y, whereas now it's just a pretentious version of Y. "Decimate" may not be a terribly significant word to use/lose, but that's not a refutation of the pattern of loss that's degrading the language. Claiming it's just an arbitrary point of view is not correct. On the other hand, a lot of people don't grasp that when you Google a word, you likely do not find all the definitions that are in a decent dictionary, so it seems like the misinformation is fairly balanced between ignoring distinctions and making up distinctions/restrictions that didn't exist in the first place.