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They are relevant due to the "people" aspects of projects, as in, the collaborative aspects of the project. I am guessing you are pulling that line from the code of conduct portion of this post. They specifically mention having a committee of several people from different backgrounds so that the can better assess potential breaches in the code of conduct.

As for if this is a regular topic of discussion besides the code, that obviously varies wildly, but I believe it's being discussed more these days.

It seems likely to be related in some way to this trend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_Covenant

If you look at some other stories, specifically "Text Rendering Hates You" and "Text Editing Hates You Too", working with non-English languages in text is tough, and it gets harder the farther from English you're working with.

Considering ethnicity is the only way to prioritize issues like that.

I wasn't thinking of the end user experience, but more of the developer experience. I'm wondering why such a clause is even written in CoCs.