I have read the threads and determined that there WAS significant political motivation in the patch that is being contended. It is apparent in the defenders' stances when discussing it, such as this one:

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu Mon Sep 20 16:15:58 UTC 2021

On 9/20/21 1:06 AM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:

The purpose of the fork would initially be to maintain the tzdb data set as it was prior to the dispute.

Such a fork would arbitrarily discriminate against countries like Angola and Niger, and in favor of countries like Norway and Sweden.

A primary goal of the recent patches was to avoid racial or national preferences that were present in the previous setup. Arguably these preferences were not intentional, or were apparent and not real; however, that's not an argument I would want to defend.

Although the problem of discrimination could also be fixed in the fork you suggest, any such fix would take considerable work. It couldn't be done merely by reverting a patch or two. All this work would be need to be done before any such fork could be used by an organization that is committed to equity, diversity and inclusion.

The opponents have stuck to technical issues in their opposition of the changes, but the defenders keep bringing up racism to argue for the changes. That's to be expected in the current political climate, only one side is allowed to attack while the other is required to meander about the margins without giving voice to the real problem.

The same person later warns that a fork better "satisfy equity, diversity, and inclusion concerns" as a parting threat.