I felt a bit of this as a child, it's just social pressure and anxiety about being outcast. I'd imagine that often being more outspoken about it is from insecurity because someone might actually be gay (or bi) and either not want to admit it to themselves or at least not want anyone to find out.
In many cases it's also probably some deep hatred of anything that goes against what they consider "right", but that too ultimately mostly stems from social pressure about honosexuality being seen as "wrong"
It doesn't help that 95% of these headlines do actually refer to LLMs. I've spent enough time on here repeating exactly that I hate the conflation of LLMs with AI in general (and the lack of acknowledgement that "AI" has never been well defined), and I still read that headline and thought "oh god no".
Still hoping that the LLM bubble collapsing frees up a lot of both expertise and computational capacity to work on actually useful models like this one.