While you might be on to something I would say modern consumer vapid culture is th e greater part. Most normie online folks are aware enough to know something will be talked about, everyone knows the bear stuff will be talked about and have videos about and posts about all over when this comes out. People crave the empty surface level engagement with whatever is happening NOW and that is the reason it was added in the first place. Someone made the ancient dnd joke of if fucking a druid in form counts as bestiality and some midwit writers and devs said yes that is hilarious everyone will be talking about that, and they're correct. Expect the shitty thumbnails of playthroughs and more articles about how "the internet is going INSANE over bear sex!!!" And for it to have some trending tag and some astroturfed memes or jokes and ultimately it will be forgotten. It's exactly the same as Lady Dmitrescu, it makes people talk and modern culture makes their entire reality these small fake "moments"

The only explanation I can think of is degenerate porn continuing to rot people's brains. We all know that's how the tranny problem got out of control, and once someone's sexuality is fucked up like that beastiality isn't that much of a jump.

Nail on the head.

I remember years ago when Overwatch started gaying up their characters, a common response from people was "Well, these characters are in all sorts of gay acts in the porn, so why not just make it canon?"

I was gobsmacked at the amount of people were basically saying: because this happens in porn, it's fine if it happens in canon.

There's another property I'm only tangentially familiar with called RWBY or something like that. Apparently in fanfiction and whatnot two characters are constantly being "shipped" together, and so I think that also became canon. And people were praising it because their erotic fanfiction was made canon.

That's kind of where we are now with media.