we've been trained by decades of sci-fi making cute bots our freinds or propositioning: "what If robots are oppressed like [insert group]" no one wants to be the person holding the 🚫🤖 sign at the protest in the movie.

Tangentially related, but I also believe that the massive overreliance on conspiracy-as-plot-device in movies and tv is one of the main reasons for the massive rise in people who believe in conspiracy theories today.

100%. We have used sentient robots as a media stand-in for oppressed human populations for so long that the central metaphor has been lost, and instead we've wound up with a huge number of people who genuiely believe rocks might be able to think.

I don't think it was really a good metaphor to begin with...Im sure there's some cases of scifi/fantastical prejudice used in an interesting way but imo most of the time it's pretty shallow