Hello. I’m aware it’s been a long time since your comment, but would like to attempt to add a bit of clarity. And simply to throw my opinion onto the internet and hope that it helps someone somewhere who just read the (seemingly not ill-intentioned but definitely maybe hurtful) above comment.
Firstly, thank you for your explanation regarding pronouns as compared to articles. I think you may have misunderstood the comment you were replying to, however. I can’t see any confusion there that needed clarifying.
As for the (current) importance of pronouns:
The main complexity that using they/them for non-gendered people brings (at least for me) is that we almost always use these words with plural grammar. Despite this, they/them has actually been in use in English when describing a single individual in a way that keeps their gender neutral or anonymous for a very long time.
To hopefully give some perspective, Japanese (for example) usually does away with pronouns entirely. There’s no need to say of the sky “it is blue” when you can simply say “(is) blue”. If it’s possible to understand a sentence with no pronouns at all, it’s possible to understand a sentence with non-traditional pronouns.
(Native Japanese speakers, please forgive my simplifications! I know I could explain this better, but I want to keep it short.)
In English, when you deliberately use pronouns for someone that are not the pronouns they’ve requested, you are being intentionally harmful. You are pushing your view of the world onto them and likely implying that you either don’t care about or dislike their existence. Far more so than by using words that sound “wrong” to you but are accepted by others as both correct and affirming.
Importantly, language, like gender, can be fluid! If there’s one thing I’ve come to realise by talking to speakers of many languages, it’s that nothing is static. How we use words changes. Using they/them singularly more often, or starting to use it/its for people who we know are sentient and sensitive, are just new changes. We come to understand concepts that we weren’t familiar with until now, and those concepts require shifts in how we use language. This is how language has always been.
In an ideal future, perhaps we could one day do away with gendered words entirely, if we wanted to.
For now, at least, using gendered (and not-gendered) pronouns when we refer to ourselves and others is a very important part of recognising who we are, of solidifying our rights and of showing solidarity with each other.
(Which isn’t to say that it’s important to everyone! Some people don’t mind or care how you refer to them, and that’s cool too!)
To use a person’s chosen pronouns is to say “you are absolutely the man/woman/enby/etc. you say you are, and I care about you”.
P.S. Obsession over “formal” use of a language is generally an unintentional form of elitism and imperialism.
P.P.S. I’m sure there are things I’ve missed and I’m sure I’ve made generalisations without realising. Please don’t be too harsh if you choose to point these out.
Edit: Changed some things to hopefully be clearer, removed some bits to make this long comment shorter. And I completely forgot to say the most important thing, which is that I love the idea of Gender All the Things and am really looking forward to playing it.