I just watched the video after reading the article, and the video -- if it's of the incident to which people were objecting -- wasn't as cringey as I expected it to be;
however, I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.
Maybe, if he saw the problem, he could've prefaced the example with warning, or otherwise acknowledged the sensitivity. I didn't get a sense that the offense was intentional.
The article had a comment that suggested someone didn't see how the similar sounds were a problem.
One reason I would suspect it's a problem (which I heard in a TV show, in which a character explains how an anti-gay slur is hurtful to them), is that they grew up hearing that slur hurled in the context of other injustices, from childhood.
I can also imagine that insensitivity to how hurtful a slur is could feel like a signal that someone doesn't understand or care about the associated injustices.
This hurtful mistake could be a learning moment for the professor, and maybe he could then help a lot of other people to also learn something constructive from it, and help everyone move forward in understanding and helping each other.