Both whitelist and allowlist are equally normal and good.
It's weird that people will claim that "politics" have no place in software while insisting that there is one and only one term "normal" people should use because the politics of the people who object to it are bad and wrong.
I agree that both words are good, but there is a difference.
Whitelist means that anything explicitly listed (in the "whitelist" or "allow list") is allowed (or included, etc) and other stuff is disallowed (or excluded) by default (although in some cases, a program (or something else) might ask instead of forcibly blocking access). It is a compound word; you should not use a space or hyphen. (Using two words "white list" may be appropriate when you are refering to colours, e.g. the white list includes the list of whatever documents are to be copied on white paper, or "white list" might mean the list that is printed on white paper.)
Allow list (I do not like the compound word; I think they should be separated and it looks better that way) is the list of what is allowed. (So, normally, this would mean that other stuff is not allowed, so it is still whitelisting.)
In situations where colours would be involved and using words such as "whitelist" would be confusing, such words should be avoided, in order to avoid confusion.
> Both whitelist and allowlist are equally normal and good.
Good is debatable, but normal?? No, obviously not. One is a word that has been around for over a hundred years and is understood by everyone that speaks English; the other is like 4 years old and only used by some software nerds. 90% of normal people would not know what it means.
90% of normal people have never heard of a whitelist either, but any English speaker could intuit what "allowlist" means more easily that "whitelist" without context. And both are technical terms of art in the context of this conversation, so what 90% of normal people would or wouldn't understand isn't even relevant.
And "enshittification" is even newer than "allowlist" and it's practically mainstream.
> any English speaker could intuit what "allowlist" means more easily that "whitelist" without context
That is not true IMO. Blacklist is a standard English word that any native speaker would know; whitelist (while not as standard) is easy to extrapolate from that.