There seems to be a certain amount of "euphemism treadmill" in Japanese pronouns, where they start off polite and drift downward in acceptability to be replaced by new ones. I have a grammar book from 1906 ("Hossfeld’s Japanese Grammar") which effectively documents some of that drift: for second person pronouns, apparently you could still get away with “addressing inferiors familiarly” with ‘kisama’ in 1906, so it hadn't yet dropped to the insult level it has now. ‘nushi’ is also listed, glossed ‘contemptuous’, and I don't think anybody uses 'nushi' as an insult today. ‘Anata’ and ‘omae’ are the 1906 recommended pronouns.
Korean also suffers from similar issues, where it's a bit more ridiculous: the textbook version of "polite" 2nd singular pronoun ("dangsin") has fallen so low that it's pretty much an insult now, and no other term has taken its place. As a result, modern Korean arguably does not have a polite 2nd person singular pronoun.
We somehow make do - it helps that Korean allows just omitting pronoun when the context is clear (same as Japanese).
主(nushi) has wrapped back around to being more on the polite side, though I get the impression it's used more by older people. There's also phrases like 持ち主(mochi-nushi -- person who is a holder of something) that have ossified the pronoun so it probably won't go away entirely for a while.
I think the reason for the rotation of pronouns is because people start using them sarcastically which means it's no longer seen as respectful, and so new pronouns become necessary.
