You have a very rational way of seeing it, and I would have done the same thing. Only thing I'd say for the original asker is to be a bit more direct, they dance around it a bit, but that's a nitpik at most.

A story, I remember about 7 years ago I was asked to go through and rename every instance of "whitelist"/"blacklist" to "allowlist"/"denylist". I stand by that searching through the codebase and having me do that everywhere was a waste of time, it took me about a full week of time just to do that change with DB migrations and frontend updates and everything in just my chunk of code, I can't imagine how much time was spent company-wide. I found out it was actually pushed by the "People Department" as they called themselves then, and they did not care at all that it was in code only and not even visible to anyone. But I rolled my eyes and did it, it's just one of those things. I do purposely choose allowlist/denylist when writing new code because I understand it, but I also stand by it was asanine and meaningless to waste time and have me do all of them at once. A better mandate would have been "If you see whitelist/blacklist, you should now change it to allowlist/blocklist as you come across it, with teammates holding that bar in PRs. No modifications should be done without also updating the naming".