I wouldn’t say not to use it “out of respect”, but rather to be aware of the fact that a lot of people took that meme from 4chan and turned it into a satire-and-irony-drenched device that allows them to express a disgusting belief and have plausible deniability whenever anyone calls them out for it, because quite frankly it seems absurd to get upset over the ok hand (whether in real life or the emoji). This is intentional, and these groups continue to invent new ways of doing the same thing, always taking something seemingly innocuous and twisting it, with the intention being to make anyone who points it out seem ridiculous.
So again it’s all about context. I’m honestly kinda apprehensive to talk about it on here because it’s such a disgusting topic and it’s inherently political and racial and all that, but there are a lot of examples of people making that gesture who are doing it in a very different way than someone who just nailed a sweet three pointer in a basketball game or a scuba diver who’s telling their diving partner that they still have plenty of oxygen in their tank. Context.