Putting things on a PCB that you know will be offensive to some people is, indeed, childish. It doesn't matter if you and your friends use the F-word all day long, the fact is that it offends many people and everyone knows that.
When I'm writing code and I feel the need to insert an expletive in a comment (which happens pretty often) I use the comic-book version !&%#@. That gets the point across without being needlessly offensive.
I see nothing amusing in this. If we are technology partners and you send me such product, be it a board , software /code, a document, etc, our relationships will end that day.
The people who find words offensive (especially to the point where they want to replace them with nonsense) are childish and, from my experiences, often hypocritical. There's nothing wrong with being offensive. In fact, we need more offensive people in the world.
Fun fact: in Australian courts of law, you cannot blank, alter, or replace "swear words" with nonsense, and you have to say the words in full as-is when giving testimony, otherwise the court can hold you for perjury for altering the evidence, and dismiss it.
As a matter of fact, I would see this kind of behaviour as a strategy. If you put something that is guaranteed to offend the Chinese, they won't end up copying your product exactly, and you have a convenient way to tell between the copycats and genuine ones. On the other hand, you'd probably want to avoid ordering PCB runs from China if you do this.
So go ahead and craft bits of traces, silk screens, solder masks, and even component layouts to make them as offensive as you possibly can, for asset protection.
So long as you don't compromise RFI/EMI immunity, reliability, or other such aspects which are sensitive to component and trace layouts of course.There is a risk, which can be calculated based on how many customers are prissy enough to take offense to a couple of words, versus the number of the more sane non-offended type.
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