They care because of legal reasons, not moral or ethical.
A regex sounds like a bad solution for profanity, but like an even worse one to bolt onto a thing that's literally designed to be able to communicate like a human and could probably easily talk its way around guardrails if it were so inclined.
We're not talking about logical inference, we're talking about CYA.
Not that I think going on a thorough mission to avoid anyone even being able to refer to the concept of death is an especially useful thing to do. It's just that goal here appears to be to "keep the regulators out of our shit and the advertisers signed up". And they'll be mostly happy with a token effort as they don't really care as long as it doesn't make too many headlines that look bad even to the non-terminally online.
That's all. I'm constantly amazed how this basic CYA legal world escapes into griping about social culture war nonsense.