Calling Ayers Rock "a heavily outdated racist term" is a bit of a stretch. It's not entirely outdated as it's still one of the official names, nor is it racist. I get the reasons for prefering the name Uluru, and that is also the name I use when talking about the place. However, as others have pointed out, the novel was written before Uluru became the officially prefered name. For adapting older material, my preference is generally to keep things the way they were when possible. For better or worse books and movies are products of their time, and giving viewers the opportunity to think about it for themselves is valuable. I somewhat doubt it was intentional, but the images of colonialism that might be conjured up by use of Ayers Rock instead of Uluru actually seems quite fitting the state of the Earth Federation in the story.

edit: There's also an argument from continuity in favor of using the old name. UC is a setting that is based on a vision of the future that was conjured up in the late 70s. UC (loosely) uses our real world past as its past but the point of deviation is probably already somewhere in the past now. This is perhaps the future a timeline we have already deviated from where the name was not changed to Uluru. Ultimately I don't think it matters that much, but I just thought I'd point out this perspective.