Let's look at your terms:

"They": who do you mean by this? Do you mean every group of engineers who has made the change? Just GitHub? The Software Conservancy?

"Not liking it": I suppose you have evidence that these changes were generally unsatisfactory to the people making them? And not, say, you projecting your own anger upon them?

"Pressure": You seem by this to posit that conventions ought not to act by pressure at all, which is a really weird way to imagine how the world works. How could a convention, or a change in convention, _not_ generate pressure?

"Forcing": You seem determined to strip engineers of their own agency, but this is silly. Only defaults have changed. Master branches still abound, and renaming within Git itself remains a relatively trivial matter.

"Gain traction": You have not been paying attention if you think this terminology shift was a sudden change made all at once from the top down. I've been in debates about master/slave terminology in CS (and specifically Git) going back to Ferguson, maybe even longer.

I get that you like your old branch name and you don't want the hassle of changing it, but all this talk of "pressure" and "forcing" by nameless adversaries is quite unnecessary to get that point across.

It was absolutely a top-down change that was propelled by a bunch of people subjected to a moral panic while simultaneously isolated and not able to converse with others. The company I was at at the time in Colorado naturally had very few black software engineers.

Because I happen to be friends with the ones we did have since we were all on the team together I happened to know that they all thought it was stupid. Every single black engineer at my former company thought the master slave terminology was not a big deal and resented the performative nature of people like yourself who clamored to get it changed.

They found it very embarrassing, and patronizing.

Not that anyone in the leadership ranks cared what they thought. They were too busy performing for the masses clamoring to capitalize on a social media trend and the moral panic propelled by activist idiots.

Not a single one of these people would ever think for a second to invite a person to dinner who had been convicted a few years earlier of holding a pregnant woman at gunpoint after invading her home. Especially if that person was white.

Suddenly they all cared in a change that happened overnight. That's great that you were pushing for these things with Ferguson but I grew up in a mostly black community and I dealt with this my whole life rather than jumping on a bandwagon like you did.

The prescribed philosophies and practices don't help the situation they just make it worse and you would know that if you had grown up in a black community like I did. You didn't so you don't.

I know a hell of a lot more about race relations than people of any color who grew up in predominantly white suburbs. I got the s** kicked out of me in the early '90s in middle school after they did a screening of Malcolm x. I actually loved the film but several boys decided it was a great occasion to beat the s** out of a white kid in response to the racism they witnessed in the film. Those are the kinds of experiences that teach you that often times you are further dividing people rather than uniting them. None of you wokies get that.

White racism created a lot of cultural conditions in places like Ferguson. Those cultural conditions continue to perpetuate themselves in the absence of the racism that first spun them into existence. Your ideology ignores this and acts like the forces that spun those things into existence are still prominent. In a nation that elected a black president. It's nonsensical and opinion polls show this.

A bunch of activist wanted more money and more prestige at the universities that employ them and they're getting it. Congratulations your side one and the country is worse off because of it.