I think removing "master" is probably just virtue signaling, but so what? It's trivial for me to switch my projects to "main", and then I can get back to my life. It's a weird hill to die on.
You can't appease arbitrary and meaningless demands.
There will just be more of them.
So you remove "master" and "blacklist", then next week it's "brown bag" and "merit".
So instead we pick a reasonable point, draw a line in a sand and indicate a hard boundary. We say no. We will not play a game of trying to appease arbitrary demands.