It's interesting that so much of this comes from academia but they exempt themselves from so much of it. The moral panic over the use of the word "master" in any context somehow turned a blind eye to master's degrees. Academics felt their usage was ok by their own ever shifting relative criteria that everyone else is expected to constantly contort themselves to follow. Very convenient how that works for them.
People (mistakenly, I believe) thought that "master branch" was derived from the disk and database "master"/"slave" metaphor, which had started being eliminated years earlier. "Master branch" was also a fairly recent coinage (within my career) limited to a few specific tools, so changing it wasn't moving mountains.