As far as themed sets go, Lego has been consistent in promoting aggressiveness in the last 30 years. Police chasing the bad guys to put them in a prison cell, pirates wanting to plunder the treasure, ninjas riding heavily-armed aircraft.
I’ll take a peer-reviewed cohort study before I believe that “Lego has been consistent in promoting aggressiveness”.
City kits always had police and my cousin mostly owned Castles/Knights. There were pirates and pirate ships with cannons that can shoot bricks (we loved those) Pirates seem to be mostly gone and replaced by Ninjago but police stuck around. No surprise, kids love police stories.
On the civilian side of Lego City, a large collection of civilian space exploration has been added. Space definitely has been demilitarized.
I'm from the region that is home to playmobil and we have a joke here that by count of items identifiable as "handgun" we have the world's largest guns manufacturer at our doorsteps, given the number of pirate and wild west kits sold each year.
I remember as a kid finding one of the then-old "shooty" cannons and it was the most prized one I had.
They've said that a main reason is there's a direct visible story with those, and their main customers are boys (not as much with LEGO Friends which is their first girl-oriented and successful line) and boys want conflict/story. "Save the people from a fire" or "catch the robber" - even a hospital falls a bit short there.
The old joke is LEGO City has fifty five thousand police stations, almost as many fire stations, one gas station, and one house.
The current hospital: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/hospital-60330 goes up against (at my count) two police stations, two fire stations, and some various "smaller" police/fire sets.
To be fair, LEGO has always had houses available, but they often fell under LEGO Classic or LEGO Creator (and now LEGO Friends).
Over time this has changed. There is an entire page on Wikipedia dedicated to chronicling this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_Lego
Because classic space had rayguns, and the pirate ships had working cannons.
It's literally written in the article that the person you are responding to linked. I'd recommend reading it.
I’m observing my kid picking up lego and assembling my old sets and they take that the same way without prompting.
Using bricklink as proof that the number of weapons increased is hilarious. Many kits used and still use regular bricks in places where they can clearly be read as weapons. (1) Lego definitely has a trend to make more specialized pieces now, so it’s not surprising at all that more specialized weapons show up.
(1) The cannonballs are listed as “Brick Round, 1x1 open stud”, because that’s what they originally are.
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3062...
The first minifigure is from 1978, the first weapon is from the same year.
But yearning for a 12 year period in the middle of the last century and talking about it as if deviating from it is a recent sign of the company losing its way, is a little odd IMHO.
There is demand for all sorts of things the society in general considers harmful.
If one chooses to offer it anyway, be prepared for the criticism.
Part of the problem is that dedicated toy stores are almost dead, so if Walmart or Target's shelf of LEGO doesn't have it, it basically doesn't exist.
When I was a kid I had a ton of castle sets. They were pretty much "neutral". Various factions doing their thing, some a bit more shady sure, but you could set up whichever story and alliance you wanted. In early 2000 it turned into humans vs ugly trolls. I felt like so much was taken away from kids by doing that.