I do think there is an increasing gulf developing with this stuff. But I tend to think it's actually quite a bad thing and will ultimately feed into really 19th century kinds of racial attitudes. That's not the intent obviously, but I think it will be the effect.
There was a thread a few days ago with a woman who was quite shocked at something referencing racial appearance a colleague said at a work training of event. He was not British and felt that what he'd said was something pretty normal among all races where he lived.
She was quite right that to hear it in the UK, or the US for that matter, would have been quite surprising and you'd wonder, who would say that? But what she and a lot of other people in the discussion didn't quite seem to understand is that in a lot of other places, including Africa where this man was from, people are much more likely to make open comments about physical charachteristics we'd think of as "racialized". The idea that any such description, even if completely without malice, is racist, is culturally specific and not universal. And if you get as far as trying to argue the logic of that (most people won't try) it's actually not obvious or an easy argument to make.
My own view is that while it's understandable that certain phrases that have been used in the past feel very othering to some, and may be best avoided, the idea that we must avoid all references to any physical charachteristics that reference ethnicity, is unwise and maybe even dangerous. It creates taboos that increase racial sensitivity, it implies that there is something negative about physical charachteristics that are common to some groups, and also asks people to pretend such things don't exist when most people are quite aware that they do. What's more it wants us to pretend that noticing such things leads to racism, and only bad people would notce such things.
Those kinds of pretending can only have negative consequences in the long run, especially when it's to the point that we are avoiding them in literary texts.
It reminds me of something I read in John McWhorter's book, Nine Naughty Words, which is about swearing. He pointed out that we no longer really mind about swear words that are religious in origin, and often even about the scatalogical ones. These offend against the orthodoxies of bygone ages. Instead the swear words that really sting our ears are the ones that offend against our feelings about groups and identities and race. But I think we can make very much the same arguments about clearing out the latter from literature as the former. Sure, a book litered with blasphemy and wearing might fail as literature because it's stupid or badly written. But that doesn't mean all literature that has blasphemy or the word "fuck" is not worth publishing or writing. Simiarly with our current sensitivities.