Languages naturally evolve over time. Only dead languages don't change.

In my lifetime, I remember one controversial change in my native Russian. By order of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation in 2016, the word "кофе" (coffee), formerly a masculine noun, was officially declared neuter. That decree made it correct to use this word in either the masculine or neuter gender. It's not like the government forced people to change — not at all. On the contrary, a lot of people continued to make this mistake of using "coffee" in the wrong gender, using neuter forms of adjectives with it and referring to it with the neuter pronoun.

Why did they do that? In Russian, words that end in "-о" or "-е" usually belong to the neuter gender. But there are exceptions, like "кофе." Why? In this case, it was spelled with a different ending in the 1700s ("кофий"), which made it grammatically masculine. Then the ending changed, but the gender didn't. As I remember, in the 2000s, it was a common mistake to use "кофе" in the neuter gender. For some it felt more natural because most other words with the same ending were also neuter. But it was considered a sign of an uneducated person. Still, over time, society gravitated towards acceptance of that usage. Then, after a while, people who corrected this mistake were considered snobs. Then the new reform came into effect. It reignited that conversation, but I guess since both genders were now acceptable, the conversation slowly died down.

In my experience, even now, I hear people predominantly treat the word "coffee" as a masculine noun. In coffee shops, baristas use treat it as masculine; it's considered professional. But no one will bat an eye if someone treats it as neuter in casual conversation. I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue about that in recent years.