[benihana]

I think it's less harm and more about principle. Nodejs is presumably maintained by hardworking people who devote their time to making it as good as they can. Presumably there's a bug tracker and they'd love contributions, and presumably this issue wasn't on their tracker (otherwise it would have been accepted outright without any issue).

I can understand the frustration of someone coming into a project and saying "I've made this change that no one on this project asked for cause the words used were offending me." It seems disrespectful to the hard work everyone is doing to keep the project up and running.

I think people would be a lot more open to things like this if there was some proof that removing gendered pronouns actually did something. It's claimed to make open source less hostile for women. Is there any proof that it's working?