> there was a brief protest by the deaf and hard-of-hearing community
As someone hard-of-hearing myself, let me clear up a couple mistakes in this:
1. The Deaf and the hard-of-hearing are not one community. Most HoH people who have sufficient augmented hearing (from CIs, hearing aids, etc) are uninvolved with the Deaf community. (Also, the community is capitalized, like "Deaf".)
2. The protests are still sorta ongoing in the Deaf community. Since most deaf children are born to non-Deaf parents, the parents typically choose treatments to give their infants some hearing (CIs, surgeries, and now genetic treatments), and many of those kids never enter the Deaf community as they grow. Thus, as a culture, the Deaf will slowly age up and die out for lack of replenishment.
I personally think the different/disabled argument mixes two concerns. To the extent that being "different" affords you the same level of dignity as anyone else, and "disabled" doesn't, I'm in agreement. Historically, we have frequently treated deaf/mute/disabled people very poorly until the modern era.
But to the extent that it denies the reality that most people have reasonable hearing, most of the world relies on it, and there exist interventions that can enable hearing, or asserts those interventions are immoral, I'm against it.
And I suspect a lot of this is driven by anxiety of the loss of Deaf culture. Are the limbless criticizing prosthetics? No, because there's not really a separate culture for that.