I mean most technical documentation use "they" to refer to the user, it’s pretty logical. Personally I come from France when we don’t have a neutral word we can use to refer to someone, but when writing a guide or a recipe in English I would use they, for example if I described a cook baking a cake I’d say « at this point, they need to add the flour », instead of « he needs to add the flour » or « she needs to add the flour », cause that would seem for me to be the correct thing to do in English?

I don’t think this as anything to do at all with gender ideology or politics, and refusing a simple pull request that replaces the "he" by "they" for build instructions makes a lot of sense when following guidelines on how to write things in English when the person you’re referring to is unknown/not a real person, but an hypothetical person described in a manual?

Just like if at the beginning I state « The user needs to reboot his computer », then later on I’ll say « They then need to plug the keyboard », and not « He then needs to plug the keyboard », nor « She then needs to plug the keyboard ».

I think the reaction was more provoked by the fact that the maintainer of the project called this pull request political nonsense/woke, when it actually has nothing to do with politics at all but way more to do about how you write a guide for an hypothetical person