    Date:        Tue, 16 Mar 2021 18:41:05 -0700
    From:        Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org>
    Message-ID:  <4ed87012-2167-44a0-583c-c1122625ea0a@cs.ucla.edu>

I have no problem with the change (don't use git anyway), but

  | Because the word "master" has negative connotations in English,

No, it doesn't.    The issue is more that no-one wants to work on
any of the real issues, which are hard, but changing the words people
use is (or can be) relatively easy, so it is attractive to do that,
rather than anything hard, and one can claim to have made progress,
when absolutely nothing that matters has changed.

kre