I think the wheelchair discourse is mainly coming from how DND (and art, broadly) is being approached by people. It's a power fantasy and very straightforward at that - what a videogame taught you expect. You've levels and EXP and you interact with mechanical math diegetically (a '+1 sword' is something that you can, like, have made to order by a dwarven blacksmith).
This very quickly makes you want to be the hero and/or just have a group that's 'on meta'. The only way to be a hero in DND is to kill monsters and whoever is not pulling their coop weight is being an ass and wasting others' time. Progress is the value of play. This is either explicitly stated or not. 'It's rude to suck at WoW' line of thinking. I played AD&D and back then and the group min-maxing was never even unconsciously considered, but some people definitely tried to do it on a personal level. We had a derogatory term for them.
Culture shifted to even more rabid media consumption; DND is media, all art is an empowering venue, so now everyone just self-inserts. (Video)games are meant to be frictionless vehicles to deliver a dope hit, so most games are just running easy dungeons, getting loot, getting levels, run more dungeons, kill another bad guy (he's evil). Everyone wants a meaningless open world sandbox, but one catered specifically to them. All of these can be great things if you try, but they do not manifest in a good way most of the time, currently. In the game, there is no life that exists, no purpose beyond loot and dungeons. So where's the space in all of this for a characterization of a disabled character? You could easily make one that's interesting, but there's very little opportunity for that kind of exploration in a raid-group oriented world. You absolutely can do it, but it requires putting in the work that most players or DMs aren't willing to do.
With all that said, it's just an issue of individualism rotting everyone's brain. We must play a self-reliant hero. We cannot be a family. We can't conceive of a disabled character that needs to be a part of the group, someone with a weakness or relying on others. They have to be a top 1% DPS dungeoneer with a perfect rotation, which obviously impossible to achieve if you have some clear, extra limitations. Accepting "it's a change, never a lessening" mindset doesn't allow for that. Something like this would require adaptation not only from the character's roleplayer, but also other characters and the DM and the world with its mechanics. It is absolutely doable. But if we're not supporting this difficult, collaborative way of solving the problem (and don't worry about the reasons 'why not?'), what else can be done to accommodate a player? There's no answer to the complicated system-created problem.
Hence a simple personal solution - just equip a wheelchair and now you're as you always were, but can wear a label. There's no crunch behind overcoming issues, there's not a single mechanic you can dip into to express that. After all, we are full and just-as-capable people and even exploring this idea seems... uncaring. We bristle at the idea of interacting mechanically or assigning numerical values to something like disability. Is it not insensitive? I tried playing a Marcus Grove and it was all hinging on my ability to roleplay and DM facilitating that, but since nobody wants to play a role other than 'themselves with elf ears' anymore, this is a non-starter.
So just get a wheelchair. It satisfies the ego, the DM doesn't have to do extra thinking, and we are free to do our weekly fantasy narrative therapy session.
In a better atmosphere this would go without saying: everyone should play as they like. You don't need permission to use a wheelchair or not and it doesn't need to make you a good person. You want to self-insert and have adventures around Faerun and a wheelchair allows for it - nothing wrong with that. Fucking, obviously. This is not about accepting magic or women in fantasy, it's not even about the chair. It's about the way we approach media. It's about how all art has sanded-off edges and everything is aimed at everyone. It's how we arrive at this being a yet another fandom fight, but-actually-activism. The you have to accept this line of thinking or you're bigoted. Every step straying further from the real issues.
Talking about this in a context of a culture war is almost unnecessary and personally unappealing because it's always the same and will continue being the same: a dividing issue that is used only as ammunition against the other side. Nothing more. It cannot be anything more. It's base and boring to even lampshade. But, let's not have a pretense that there is a conversation happening. The war is still going, a new micro-front appeared for a second.
We will be back here again.
