I'm sure it was worth making breaking changes to make Kubernetes more "inclusive"... whatever that means. As if Kubernetes ever excluded anybody, or "master" referred to slavery in any way.
These terminology changes date back to the George Floyd protests, and instead of getting action to solve the actual problem, we got blog posts from GitHub about changing the default branch name, so they can feel like they're doing something and elevate their brand.
Iirc this shift was actually much older and started as a pre-gamergate idealogical proxywar. There were even various projects parodying wokeness in tech at the time to comment on it. For example C+= which was a C++ derivative that had more "inclusive" keywords