90% of normal people have never heard of a whitelist either, but any English speaker could intuit what "allowlist" means more easily that "whitelist" without context. And both are technical terms of art in the context of this conversation, so what 90% of normal people would or wouldn't understand isn't even relevant.
And "enshittification" is even newer than "allowlist" and it's practically mainstream.
> any English speaker could intuit what "allowlist" means more easily that "whitelist" without context
That is not true IMO. Blacklist is a standard English word that any native speaker would know; whitelist (while not as standard) is easy to extrapolate from that.