An essential element of a bike shed disagreement is that the matter being discussed must be trivial. That is, the color of a bike shed doesn't matter. It has no impact on the utility of the bike shed. This is a function before form viewpoint.
Ah, but if real life were only so black & white.
In practice, triviality is a sliding scale. The presence of the offset is only trivial if you're not using it. So, to some people, it's a bike shed issue. To others, it's a matter of breaking lots of code. Clearly not a bike shed.
So my understanding of the situation was poor. But then I am, admittedly, a bike shedding rookie.
However, and this is just my opinion, I still feel as though calling out everyone (there was a good number of people involved including @tpope) as rookies and accusing them of bike shedding, seemed like, well, poor taste, and unhelpful.
Hmm, call it bike-shedding if you want, but I have to be honest part of the beauty and value of Ruby is how semantic it can be made when you follow some conventions. How hard or awful is it to just actually return a boolean here? I mean is anyone expecting or relying on the clearly undocumented feature that it also returns the offset of where `/XMLHttpRequest/i` is found in the request?
The problem with throwing out the 'bikeshedding' defence is that it goes both ways. It's their choice to fight a small, trivial pull request that appears to make logical sense, and arguably reduces the potential for cognitive friction.
It's debatable who's actually bikeshedding here.