Okay, so now I have a word for this behavior, thanks.

I've managed to avoid seeing it too often but that's also through probably getting lucky with tiny, focused communities and only looking at Subscribed (sometimes Local on certain instances—ani.social has been "safe" for avoiding politics in my opinion). And outright refusing meme communities not because I have an issue with memes but because there's usually a depressing "relatable" one where unfortunately yammering about the cause behind that depressing thing is on-topic, and usually attributed to something political.

I do content discovery through trawling through the community list on an instance and picking something cool and following !newcommunities@lemmy.world. For people who don't want to mostly take a "my interests only, everything else can be safely ignored" attitude, or whose interests involve topics that frequently intersect with politics (imagine being into tech, seeing on-topic tech news that… also has political implications or directly talks politics), I'm just really sorry for you right now.