That actually makes sense.
>the minority of people for whom the word itself is jarring
Are these people so upset by the word that their brains fail to parse it when one vowel is obscured? Everyone else seems to know immediately what it means without any extra cognitive effort. If they actually can't parse it, what happens then? Do they just internally shout "LALALALALALA I'M NOT READING!" and quickly carry on with the sentence before they second-guess their own sense of shame? As I said, I really get twisted up trying to imagine it.
We've all seen that thing where you can still read sentences with jumbled words as long as the first and last letters remain the same. Plus, the set of words taboo enough to censor in this way is so small that you could blank out all of the letters and I'd still be able to immediately know what was said just by the context.
EDIT: I've just realised, there is a precedent that long predates the internet: the jewish(?) practice of writing g-d instead of god. This is obviously associated with the general abrahamic thing about the name of god being forbidden which is present in islam as well.
You're at your mom's house, eating dinner. Suddenly, you realize that a call to nature must be answered, urgently.
Which phrase do you use?
"Mom, hold that thought, I gotta take a shit"
"Excuse me for a moment, I need to use the bathroom""Go to the bathroom" and "take a shit" are completely separate phrases, they don't even necessarily refer to the same activity. It's not even really a euphemism.
I used to date a girl who did not like swearing. She would correct me if I used fuck or some other swear word. It's not that she was a prude; she was quite adventurous in bed and the sex was great, but she just had a problem with these words. Knowing that someone like her could be a reader of what I'm writing, I'd disguise the word.
Think of it like a weaker form of rot-13 encoding...