It's interesting you bring up Linus Torvalds in this discussion because he, around the same time as the Github changes, signed off[0] on an update to the terminology used in the Linux kernel. To me it's not a decision I expected, but watching some older talks where it's been brought up to him he seems to be indifferent to the controversy and just wants to focus on the tech.

[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...