The best reasoning I saw for this change was for clarity for non native English speakers. If you're learning the language "allowlist" is definitely more clear in meaning than "whitelist"

A lot of companies seem to be doing this, personally I think trying to make a connection between race and tech is a bit far fetched. Nobody thinks of race when talking about whitelists and blacklists...

In public repos where these changes are merged in to FOSS projects, they get little resistance too - although I could see concern of a potential backlash if anyone questioned the alleged benefit of such a change.

Imagine if this approach was taken with the (now outdated) IDE interface? Instead of "Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave", there'd maybe be "Primary Primary, Primary Secondary, Secondary Primary, Secondary Secondary" 😵‍

I do think dropping master is absurd, since it in no way implies slavery or any such thing. master mostly has uses that are entirely inoffensive, unless post-graduate degrees are racist, for example.

But I do think there is some merit in moving off the idea of white is good and black is bad. There are some good arguments that we shouldn't bestow magic powers upon words, but there is also a lot of merit in the idea that these words affect our perception in negative ways and there is really nothing lost by shifting to equally good alternatives.