It’s for the dev team itself. They don’t want to be working on a character that reminds them of the that used to work down the hall.
They have no financial incentive to change it, and can very clearly get away with it given how many people don’t want the change, which leaves the dev team as the only real reason behind doing this. So complaining about catering to SJWs isn’t going to do much because that wasn’t the point of the change to begin with.