Bitkeeper, which early git developers were familiar with, did use master in a master/slave relationship. While git does not enforce such "hierarchy", there remains an association (both in how we use the word outside of the context of git as well as historically in how the word was used by predecessor SCSes).
> master/slave has been with us since forever
"Tradition" or "we've always done it that way" is not a great excuse, especially when part of the problem is systemic papercuts. It's not surprising that systemic issues rely a lot on "tradition" to do their dirty work.
Whether or not you agree with the particular etymology/association being questioned, the very point of questioning it is whether or not this "tradition" is worth the pain of systemic papercuts. We've got a lot of other useful words, we don't have to keep using ones that cause papercuts just because of "tradition" (whether or not you personally suffer from those papercuts).
Paul Graham published an essay recently which describes these kind of people as "aggressively conventionally-minded": http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html
Essentially there are some people who will follow rules and trends without questioning them. Among those there are some who will actively seek to punish those who do not follow the rules.
This master/slave thing is a new rule born out of guilt and virtue signalling. This comes from the fact that some people see themselves as genuinely superior to others and this makes them uncomfortable. They virtue signal in an attempt to fight against this feeling, rather than just accepting what may be true, moving on, and continuing to be a good person. It's a phenomenon that has been observed in many contexts. The most vocal homophobes are often homosexual themselves. The most vocal religious devotees often have the strongest doubts.
This argument comes off as very condescending in a soft bigotry of low expectations-type of way, given there's nothing else within git that even hints to master being related to master-slave terminology.
> master/slave has been with us since forever
"Tradition" or "we've always done it that way" is not a great excuse, especially when part of the problem is systemic papercuts. It's not surprising that systemic issues rely a lot on "tradition" to do their dirty work.
Whether or not you agree with the particular etymology/association being questioned, the very point of questioning it is whether or not this "tradition" is worth the pain of systemic papercuts. We've got a lot of other useful words, we don't have to keep using ones that cause papercuts just because of "tradition" (whether or not you personally suffer from those papercuts).