Words have both denotational and connotational meanings. The denotational meaning of censorship might be something like "official suppression of objectionable portions of a book, artwork, communication, etc." The connotation, as the word is being used here, is "bad."
When Steve says "I don't think this is censorship because it's not like governments censoring dissent" he's not engaging in whataboutism, he's disagreeing with the connotation that this is bad. When people get mad at him for saying "localization" instead of "censorship," they're not arguing that these changes weren't made to adapt this game to the US market, they're arguing that this is bad.
It's not complicated. When people disagree with you saying "censorship" they're disagreeing with your implied connotation of this being bad. If you don't want to argue semantics, just find another way to argue that this is bad without restricting yourself to arguing about the word "censorship." Plenty of people have already done that in this thread.
Then I'd have to ask, what makes the censorship in #FE's case "good"? From what we've seen, the content edits have included the removal of more mature content, relevant to the themes of the game.
A dungeon based around a character's sexuality was changed to be about generic modeling. Coming to terms with one's sexuality is a thing people within the age demographic of this game have to deal with. As evidenced by other games dealing with similar content getting a T rating, its inclusion wouldn't have raised the age rating.
They partially removed Tsubasa's bikini, as it can't be used during gameplay but it still appears when a certain special attack is used. As it's still in the game, its inclusion evidently has no effect on the game's age rating.
A character was shifted from laying on a couch to sitting on it. This was probably changed to prevent the character from looking submissive and defenseless. Unfortunately, it makes it look like she's performing a sex act on another character. The edit is inconsequential, and honestly serves no real purpose.
A demon character has black flames superimposed over her over her breasts during an animated cutscene, obviously meant to cover up the cleavage. However, during regular gameplay, the flames are gone, and her cleavage is clearly visible. Evidently, her cleavage being visible would've had no effect on the age rating.
During an animated cutscene, Tsubasa's pelvic bones are erased, and her cleavage covered by a white tanktop. This was probably done to reduce the sexual aspects of Tsubasa's character design. However, there's a second Tsubasa in the cutscene with very obvious, prominent cleavage. As such, the editing in this scene is inconsistent, and likely would've had no effect on the age rating.
From all of the things that were changed, my issue is they come off as highly unnecessary, inconsistent, and have far too much effort put into them for a result that achieves pretty much nothing. I don't see how these could be considered "good" changes. They're dulling the consequences of the narrative, they're changing imagery in one scene and leaving it in another, and they're making their own censorship null in the same scene an edit appears.
From what I've seen, these are all very poor changes, and actively bring down the quality of the product. If somebody can rationalize those as positives, then more power to them.
