Is it the better long-term approach? If you give in to a vocal minority what is stopping them from trying to change something else? Git means "an unpleasant or contemptible person". Surely that could be construed as offensive. What happens when / if a vocal minority decides Git and Github need to change their name? Should Github just change their name to prevent backlash?
Not to mention it appears to be mostly white people pushing this change, not even the alleged victims.
Nobody would have complained about GitHub doing nothing had GitHub done nothing.
Now we get to complain about their mindless actions, and possibly later on their spineless back-pedalling.
"Some of them will complain" -- a majority? Then yes, it makes sense to listen and adapt. Or, a loud minority who threatens? I don't believe that the change was made due to any overwhelming user feedback.
You are completely inverting democracy.
If 98% of people vote that something isn't offensive, and 2% vote that it is, and your takeaway from this is "the thing is offensive", then how can anything ever be determined to be not offensive?
If you really want to, you can use "master" as the name on your new repos. You simply have to manually type that in now.
Glad we settled that one!
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheCulture