Yes, the term woke definitely expanded when companies got involved. It's also when it lost all meaning as it very quickly meant that the definition just became 'I dont like it so I'll call it woke.'I don't think your source agrees with you. That link says it was used by activists from 2012 to 2016, not to attack them.
Emphasis mine. Your link is basically saying the same thing I am. "Woke" was used in some sense for decades, and used a lot by activists since BLM took off, but became a term used to attack people once corporations started using "woke" messaging to try and sell their brands.
But then, before they started using woke, they were calling it Anti-American, Comminist, Anti-family. They just found a new buzzword to say the exact same thing over the last century
Now, as I said, business definitely do use ideologies to sell products. Theranos was a good example. They misapplied the concept of Feminism to femJobs. They pretended that you can't criticize females because of previous history. Which is nonsense. Femisism is about deleting stereotypes. Eg. The old stereotype of girls not being good at math. Criticizing that misconception does NOT mean you think all girl are good at math. It just means we do it on a case by case basis, and try not to do blanket judgements. So, criticising femJobs for her work is fine. Criticizing her for being what you think a female should be is not. Most people on the left didn't see her as a good person
Because woke has just been applied to everything it might be hard to realise that most woke people aren't into capitalism. But, some Capitalists exploit the terms woke use to sell shit. Capitalists had a blood test to sell and they mutilated woke or Feminist terms to sell it because they thought pandering would help them
Lastly, I'm personally against all companies pandering whether it be woke, guns drapped in American flags, nostaglia reboots or even nappy commercials which all have the same vibe. The Team America World Police was partly about how pandering companies and the US government is to drive the population to a certain mentality. You realise that MAGA hats are just PR pandering to conservative identity politics. At least Gillette didn't try and force a hat on me.
Anyway, all this is to say that I wish there was a way to stop all this pandering to various because currently masculinity is based on 1980s pop culture and it would be really cool if society made up what masculinity means, not the directors of Predator and Missing in Action. Similarly, I can see She-Ra being lesbian propaganda