oh, this makes perfect sense! i think the resurgence in the usage of the word is yet another symptom of people thinking it’s funny to be a south park character in real life (politically “incorrect” and insensitive, hateful towards minorities in a way that isn’t even tongue-in-cheek) etc as a response to feeling that things nowadays are just “too woke” and they therefore need to ascertain their right to say offensive things — fat fucks are disgusting, something something gay people, you’re a r word, you’re literally a man lol (to a trans woman), etc — and this in turn ends up taking us to an even more regressive place than the one we were at in, say, 2018, which you sorta referenced when you said this wasn’t as common years ago; we’re going backwards because progressiveness and change has made people overly defensive, so they chase ghosts through violent language that they wouldn’t use if they weren’t actively trying to provoke others and be edgy.

also i wouldn’t even have thought of the word rape instead of the actual slur because i don’t see any reason to censor that, it’s a horrible thing but it’s worse if we make it taboo! with all this said, i’ll answer your actual question: i think using it is bad in general, and using it against neurotypical people might not be as evil as using it against someone with an actual learning disability, a deformity or a disorder, but the same logic of associating disabled traits to stupidity/slowness/something undesirable is still there, you’re just targeting it at someone who doesn’t have any conditions (less mean-spirited than the first scenario, still bad). this is pretty cultural though (in the sense that each language/country is gonna view this differently) and i grew up with it being a pretty normalized insult among kids, so if i had to unlearn any prejudiced language as i was growing up, this was it lol. i’m doneee and i hope you don’t mind that it got super long