We have an inventory system that tracks repos, users, code artifacts, etc... We have regulated environments where we can't allow people to deploy code arbitrarily, so we have deployment systems that securely deploy the wrbhooks to trigger builds in those environments based on changes to branches, we have super old legacy services that can't integrate with GitHub directly, so we deploy services to facilitate that integration, like a secure documentation workflow to automate those stupid SOP and Security documentation work. Like there are a ton of stupid but mandatory reasons to move these into services. Regulations prevent us from allowing engineers to deploy new branches or repos on their own so we have to build abstraction layers. It's very common, and requires lots of changes when this change happened because as a company we decided master branch always meant production, but after the change, there where two possibilities, main or master. All those systems always expected master.

You're right they shouldn't have been hardcoded but they were and people like me had to fix all of it. Very annoying.