My reaction was "If you want to write some documentation with bias-free language, just write the documentation with bias-free language." Why the need for a long paragraph explaining "Look how great and sensitive we are!"

I understand, and agree with, the desire to use inclusive language, but so much of this has just devolved into performative nonsense.

Edit: Thought I'd leave my original statement above up, but after reading some of the other comments below I at least understand now the purpose of this notice. Basically, when it comes to Cisco's products, they previously used "master/slave" and "whitelist/blacklist" in their terminology, but no longer do. However, of course some older networking products still use that terminology in UI software, for example. So this notice is essentially saying "We got the memo about updated language, but if you see the terms master/slave or whitelist/blacklist in our docs, it's because it's essentially referencing something out of our control to fix, so don't yell at us."

It's a device to identify certain kinds of people who would have a problem with less loaded language without any loss in clarity.

Having a statement like that shows people that they are open to suggestions on improvements. Since a lot of people are not so open to suggestions, it makes sense to me to include this language. They added a little X button so you can close it easily.

The docs may include "master/slave", and they don't want to get sued or bad PR, so this generic notice says "we don't like bad words but sometimes the industry uses bad words and that's unfortunate". If you click the Learn More link in the paragraph, you'll learn more.

Goes well with the legal disclaimer that follows.

The legal or whatever-not-technical department wanted to leave their mark.