Yeah. For my own projects, and/or on my own command-line, I don't care what "ma<tab>" resolves to. "main" is not a terrible choice.
But as a teacher, the way this makes all the existing guides and tutorials wrong means I have to waste 15 minutes of my semester (about 1%) explaining this.
In short, the main effect of this change is to very slightly raise the barrier to entry for new developers.
On the other hand, for the non/new developers I’ve interacted with [non-US], “master” was a confusingly jargonistic name that has raised eyebrows for years. Being the “main” branch seems a much plainer, obvious name, and I think it’s an improvement entirely separate from any social reasons.
Is it an empty gesture? Maybe? Does it cost more than a couple of seconds for making things clearer and making a minority of people people happy? No.
It probably wasted more integrated time across all the people reading this article than just shrugging and changing it does.
But as a teacher, the way this makes all the existing guides and tutorials wrong means I have to waste 15 minutes of my semester (about 1%) explaining this.
In short, the main effect of this change is to very slightly raise the barrier to entry for new developers.