It takes a few minutes to switch. Maybe a bit more to rebind all CI scripts etc in a project as large as react. There are some things that I don't fully get (slavery was never big in my country).
It takes a few minutes of effort to not be an asshole (real or perceived), so I just do it rather than thinking to much about whether or not the wider population should be offended or not.
We do not have a monorepo, and you can practically watch the gears turn when we mention any process change that involves changing the CI scripts. And this part may be projection, but I am nearly certain I see people subconsciously avoiding solutions that involve systemic CI changes.
I got tired of making clerical errors or helping others fix theirs and went through and moved a bunch of configuration out of our CI configs into source control. So for my projects making changes is easier, but I still bump into mature projects that still have the old patterns because nobody even wanted to edit the configs one last time.
I fully understand not changing for that reason and don't think anyone would think less of a justifiably difficult situation.
But at the same time, what you described is probably indicative of deeper issues which should be considered technical debt, not because of political correctness but because there may be other inflexibility which inhibit productivity in the future.
Not wanting to be seen as an asshole is how we end up with a never ending stream of bullshit because no one is brave enough to stand up. How much time has been wasted on feel good crap that serves only to give the illusion of caring.
Big tech is happy to rename their git branches while doing nothing about the actual evil they commit.
It takes a few minutes of effort to not be an asshole (real or perceived), so I just do it rather than thinking to much about whether or not the wider population should be offended or not.