That would have killed a portion of it, but you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who are tuned into such things. Its why games like BG3 (solid typo to give me a good example) are able to be massive successes despite being absurdly woke too, even if people here will swear its not (because they like it so it gets a pass).

But putting an extra wall in between them getting it (and even knowing it released because Steam isn't going to advertise a game not on it) will absolutely kill any possible momentum. Especially after a long stretch of time, wherein most people stop paying attention to your series, where you dropped a legitimately awful prequel in the middle.

Now the wokeness of Borderlands 3, on top of it being a stale dead genre released far too late to recapture its prior popularity, has certainly killed any momentum it could have going further. With the Tiny Tina series flopping and the mockery of the live action series proceeding to bury it from there.