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My theory is that the "right side of history" narrative (and its close cousins, casting being progressive as just being a "decent human being" and denigrating opposition as "retrograde" or "reactionary") is so ubiquitous because the progressive left is deeply confused about whether it believes in moral realism, and so adopts an inconsistent (but very effective) posture on moral questions.
On these big social questions, there are, at root, three reasons for acting:
"The right side of history" tries to have it all three ways while not committing enough to any of them to expose weakness there.
Straightforward moral realism is a problem for the progressive left (at least in its modern incarnation; past movements vary) for two reasons. First, because most of its thought leaders are not moral realists, and many of the rest would reject moral realism if the question were put to them (though they may implicitly act as if they believed in it). Second, because the natural response to "It is a moral law of the universe that [insert progressive cause here] is good" is to say: "And how do you know? I'm pretty sure I've always heard that God said the opposite, my intuitions disagree, and anyway you just got done telling me that you don't believe in hearing from God, so why should I believe you?"
Straightforward appeals to power or preference are not persuasive -- at least not unless you already have the power and just want to compel, not "win hearts and minds".
And finally, appealing to people's "go along to get along" instincts is tough unless you can offer social proof that either your cause already dominates, or soon will. (It works wonders when you can, though -- see what happened to gay marriage.)
Enter "the right side of history". It appeals to moral realist intuitions and persuasive force, while not actually committing anyone to staking out an actual claim about ground truth morality. It can be a threat based on present or claimed future power without being explicit about it. It appeals to "go along to get along" without having to actually produce the goods in terms of current social influence.
Time will tell (ha) about whether the rhetorical strategy will continue to be effective, but I expect that, absent major ideological realignment, it will continue to be used in one form or another.
This is an extremely accurate description of the phenomenon, and it's prevalent here as well, contributing to Hlynka's observation that a surprising number of the commenters here have built their positions on the same fundamental ground as the progressive left, though they want to vehemently deny it, as well as my observation that this turn to stealth moral relativism packaged in confusion came, in large part, due to New Internet Atheism convincing a lot of folks to at least claim a jettison of moral realism, but not knowing how to handle it philosophically, and leading pretty directly into the dominant frame being one of pure power politics along the lines of cancel/deplatform/shame woke-style culture.
So far, when I've prodded, I've seen one commenter embrace the conclusion in a clear-eyed manner, but more often, folks just lean in to the mire of completely confused meta-ethics. After seeing your excellent trilemma, it makes sense that it seems common to appeal to game theory, even if it's still a confused appeal, because I'm starting to think that the appeal to game theory is basically a variant of "the right side of history". One doesn't need to do any of the hard work of showing why an iterative game theoretic process will actually converge to the "right" solution (because one cannot commit to positing a "right" solution), but you can see in those threads that they are utterly allergic to embracing a straightforward appeal to power or preference. So we get weaksauce meta-ethics that make it obvious to any real, existing agents who actually understand game theory and can think through the process of unilateral defection (perhaps at the level of a movement/group of 'insiders') and realize that no one is able to present a meaningful argument against pure exertion of cultural power, so the obvious game theoretic response is to do precisely that. It's like they sort of realize that they're playing something akin to prisoner's dilemma, but weirdly think that invoking "the right side of history" or vague "game theoretic concerns" will certainly result in cooperate-cooperate, but simultaneously not understanding game theory enough to know that it actually leads to "the wrong side of history", defection, and pure power.
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