This whole cancel culture myth

If you take the longer view "cancel culture" is just a new moniker for a set of cultural boundaries which have always existed in every culture. Free speech is largely a comfortable myth we like to believe in. The pope got mentioned along with the banal "oh well they have excommunication, so..." stuff. Yep, they do. It was ultimate spiritual censure of those who strayed beyond the Church's teaching, couched in a way to nudge the straying back to the grace of God. If you wore sackcloth and repented you were back in, though there was usually a time period of reflection to make sure the 'fallen' weren't faking repentance.

If JK Rowling wore sackcloth and ashes in public, threw a few quid towards Trans organisations and self flagellated her heresies on the talk show circuit, chances are very high she'd be back in. In a similar way to excommunication back in the day, the richer you were, the bigger earner, the quicker you'd get the arms of the Church opening back up. Or be as poor as a church mouse, a broken soul. That can work too as cultural churches de jour like to appear magnanimous. I suspect Linehan would have a harder sell. He's not rich enough, nor broken enough and he's male, which in the current culture is against him. Unless he came out as Trans and then the church doors would fly open.

Every culture has its boundaries and censure for those boundaries being crossed and the majority of those within the culture accept these boundaries secondhand with little thought and either actively support these boundaries and censures or stand by looking the other way while they're enacted on others. Within cultures you always have the loud bible thumpers who set the harder edges, often on the fringe. Social media just gives them a wider pulpit. As i does the naysayers and heretics. The former try to exert pressure on the authorities to silence the latter. That's the real danger. That's how you arrive at 'accepted truths', no matter how daft. Though these 'accepted truths' rarely last for long, but those who hold them as gospel always think them immutable.

Rinse and repeat.