> Wikipedia’s use of it is surprising to our present day audience, and it may decrease the perceived strength of domain branding
Really? That’s the reasoning, and not the fact that mobile links forwarded to desktop browsers would render the mobile view?!
With m., they used to see a mobile layout that’s a really poor fit for a desktop screen and that they would have manually switch out of via some relatively obscure button.
Of course it is, they just need to drop the pretense that English is not the default.
If you read the more technical internal rationals instead of just the press release, what you said is mentioned as one of the reasons for the change
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Mobile_d...