Civilization will certainly not fall apart if language changes again, as it has for the entire history of spoken language - notably, Old English would be unintelligible to most of us now and civilization is working just fine. I just learned looking this up that Early English had a 4-form system consisting of yea/nae/yes/no ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_f... ), which is fascinating, and we appear to be doing just fine without yea and nae nowadays.
Anyway, I'll note that release and drop are near-synonyms if you're talking about a physical object, so their similar use for features etc isn't wild at all, and is well established in culture (drop an album, etc), so I don't think this is nearly as big a change (like yes->no would be) as you think.
There also is no inhabited universe in which the words yes and no can survive being flipped in their meaning, because an attempt at such a flip will result in total collapse, in a universe without life.
Among several slang definitions for "drop", Oxford English Dictionary includes "To release or make available" with multiple examples going back to 1988: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/drop_v?tab=meaning_and_use#60...
> They're used as such only by dorks, click optimizers, and SEO scammers.
That's clearly not true.
Everyone has their pet peeves, but this is a ridiculous thing to post a "Tell HN" about.
Did I release the ball from my hand?
Did I drop the ball?