Suits, sports cars, women, and whatever other precious alpha status symbol you seem to judge your sense of self-worth by and make metaphors with come in all the colors of rainbow, so yeah, of course that's all taste. Whitelist and blacklist is pretty dual. Black-and-white you might say. Maybe there's a third default/unspecified/null/not-quite-binary state.

But seriously, we're a bunch of engineers here... why is this so threatening to your sense of masculinity when "allowlist/denylist" are unambiguously better for no simpler reason than they're declarative?