There have been issues with git's master->main transition as well, once automated systems came into play that expected to find a master branch. This is also my main complaint about that particular episode: Too much "somebody needs to do something" mandates, and too little "how to do it properly" (which would provide benefits for other situations as well.) When the two parts of the activity are split between two different groups, there's no incentive, either: The mandate group checks a box and walks away happily, having reached their OKR. The implementation group doesn't get the devops time to implement proper aliasing and what-have-you, so they just wing it until everything works again.

That said, it's mostly water under the bridge right now, and it isn't applicable at all for the "reference image for computer graphics papers" situation unless somebody starts rewriting all the old papers to reference a different image:

A "somebody needs to do something" mandate would likely lead to new versions of the old papers in which the image is removed without replacement. The "do it right" solution would lead to people replicating the research with different material, which might not even be for the worst - but I see no chance that will happen at scale.