somewhere the game just has a massive list of words in a file, that are considered offensive, and it's just outright pattern matching.

As one person above already said, it won't match to a version of the word with an uppercase letter because they didn't add that variant. Or variants with dollar signs instead of S's, or 1 instead of I's. It's just super lazy censorship.

And bizarrely, these files are usually stored as plaintext. So people can open one of these files, and then just be utterly gobsmacked by a super concentrated list of utterly offensive words. I worked for a server rental company, and on more then one occasion we had a parent stumble on these files while setting up a server for their kids... and... well... there's just... not a lot... you can say to an angry parent when they find these lists (they sometimes have thousands of offensive words, sexual, racial, etc).