It may look in innocent and reasonable by itself, but there's a history where someone starts something like this (changing pronouns to their favorite one, deman

It may look in innocent and reasonable by itself, but there's a history where someone starts something like this (changing pronouns to their favorite one, demand people are racist for using master/slave terminology, demand to kick someone from project because he said something on twitter, etc) and it starts an absolute shitstorm of various self-righteous commenters on github or elsewhere running a witch-hunt. The standard practice for facing SJW lynch mob is to remove their ability to affect the project negatively, usually by making issues and comments contributor only (on github) and waiting for it to blow over because the Internet Hate Machine doesn't have long attention span. It seems to me that the R maintainer just did this standard response.