I'm curious what kinds of problems took dozens of hours to fix. We had a script that was using master, and the default name of main (Github) broke things. But it wasn't a surprise, we knew it was coming, someone just forgot to adjust a script.
They just changed the script, took about 30 seconds. If you had a lot of scripts, then you could always make a master branch and use it instead of main. That would also be pretty quick to fix.
And it wasn't like when Github changed things (or now git itself will be changing) there weren't announcements. You'd have to have been living under a rock to not know about it and be taken by surprise.
One of the companies I worked for had self-hosted subversion hosting and accessing it required connecting to a VPN first. The IP address of that SVN server changed multiple times as we migrated between hardware and even VPN providers.
It's annoying, but you just dig up the new credentials, update the script to point to the right place and move on with your life. I shudder to think of the kind of environment where updating a branch name... not even a domain or IP address... would cause significant turmoil.
not your parent commenter and I have yet to have a problem with the branch name change but I could see it taking a long time to figure out. It's perfectly normal to assume branch names don't change often, specially master/main.
Abd if it took Cloudflare 3 hours to find out that a rust process was panicing and crashing, a branch name change in someone's ci/cd is less expected in the chain of probable causes and could take more time to detect.
They just changed the script, took about 30 seconds. If you had a lot of scripts, then you could always make a master branch and use it instead of main. That would also be pretty quick to fix.
And it wasn't like when Github changed things (or now git itself will be changing) there weren't announcements. You'd have to have been living under a rock to not know about it and be taken by surprise.