I think that others have done a sufficient job of answering the main question. I have things to say about the secondary questions:
how badly damaged is it?
I am wondering how it would be possible to reverse or remove that opinion of so many.
I’ve actually put quite a bit of thought into this problem. Countering the intentional destruction of language in general seems to be basically impossible to do directly because of how many people there are who have no particular interest in figuring out what the word really means, and who just perpetuate the current zeitgeist via sheer inertia. It also doesn’t help that there are a great many who claim to be anarchists who actually want the term to be misunderstood. The nihilistic version of anarchism that you’re calling out is perfect for sociopathic individuals who want a world without accountability.
My conclusion is that the word itself has become effectively destroyed and unusable (except in contexts where you know that your audience is made of the small subset of people who actually understand what it is supposed to mean) and needs to be replaced. However, attempting to just invent a new term for the same ideas won’t quite work either, because it will just be equated to the old one, and destroyed by the very same actors as before. We may be able to buy some time, but we need to do something about the forces that work to destroy the language itself if we want a lasting solution.
We need to learn how to protect ourselves from the actors that consistently sabotage our efforts to communicate, form communities and institutions, and actually accomplish objectives. We need to learn how to recognize those actors reliably, and keep them out of our spaces. Feds and such aren’t really the main issue here - it’s the people that claim to be our allies but instead subvert our rhetoric and activity to their own selfish ends that we need to be most wary of.
Once we can keep our spaces clean, we’ll have control over our language again, and we can use a new term or the old one. Those who are actually interested in doing good can be kept safe from the interference of bad-faith actors as long as they are able to find their way into these spaces.
While people living in past civilizations at their lowest points might be willing to trade places with us, the vast majority of humans for the vast majority of human history would not be. When offered to join the ranks of the civilized world, “uncivilized” indigenous people consistently turn down the offer. They think that we’re all insane.
The past 20,000 years are not all of human history. Prior to the development of civilization, life was actually pretty good for most people. They also didn’t have to worry about most of the things in that article. The only significant material differences were higher infant mortality, and lower overall material wealth (but this lower material wealth did not mean a lower quality of life, in general, as people’s lifestyles and culture were adapted to that level of wealth). The lack of medical care was largely a non-issue, because those people did not suffer from the diseases of civilization, were typically naturally resistant to bacterial infections due to diet, and what infectious diseases did plague them were generally unable to spread very far or very fast because the different groups were not constantly forced to intermingle in tight indoor spaces at large scales.
This whole article reinforces a false narrative known as the “Myth of Progress”. This is a very dangerous and toxic myth that undermines a lot of people’s reasoning about what the future should look like. This is intentional - the myth of progress is propaganda pushed by the state via school curriculum and academic publication bias (though this latter mechanism is starting to fail - most academics now reject the myth of progress) to warp people’s sense of what life could be like.
I would recommend that people read books like “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” by Weston A. Price, “Civilized to Death” by Christopher Ryan, or “Goliath’s Curse” by Luke Kemp to get an overall better picture of the relationship between living conditions in the past versus the modern day.
To clarify, I am not suggesting that life in the stone age (or prior) is the human ideal and that we should go back to that. I am not a primtivist (though I am aware that the collapse of global civilization may limit our options, realistically). I am merely suggesting that we can’t assume that life in modern civilization is as much better than life in the past as so many people claim. We should be looking at all of human history and taking the best ideas from all parts of it to inform a model of how we should be doing things going forward. In order to do that, we can’t let myths cloud our perception of what the past was actually like.