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Why? You were always free to delete or rename the master branch. There are enough repositories which don't have a master branch.

Unlike SVN (trunk), in git "master" really has no value to the VCS.

I also assume this will be for new repositories, so Github won't break builds by changing existing repositories - because that would indeed mess up a lot.

Now that consider all tools need to support new non-offensive terminology and old racist terminology used in existing projects

I'm saying that every tool/service that integrates with Github will now have to know whether the "default" branch is called master or main. Bugs will be caused by that and a lot of services will break.

They already had to know that. Plenty of repos use `develop` as their primary branch name.

Then that tooling was broken to begin with.

Newsflash: most software makes assumptions that it shouldn't. Doesn't mean it's acceptable for something like Github to break it just because "well, you shouldn't have done that".

Yes. Software evolves as the environment evolves. Software that can't evolve gets replaced.