Erdogan changed it because he is a nationalist and took offense to the name of his country being compared to the bird. So now the country is on a PR campaign to get the international community on board with Türkiye, which is supposedly a more accurate phonetic rendering of the country's name (if your language has the same phonetics as Turkish).

Personally, while I do think it's a bit silly for countries to try to mandate what they are called in other languages (e.g. you don't see Germany getting upset that not a single one of their neighbors save Austria calls them "Deutschland"), I know Turkey is not the first to do so and I generally respect attempts to "reclaim" identities (such as changing Kiev to Kyiv for Ukraine). But I think the umlaut is where I draw the line.

When I heard them announce Turkey during the opening ceremony of the Olympics, it sounded more like "Turkia" to me, so I don't know why we don't just use that, since my mind keeps reading Türkiye as "Toork-yay".

Plus when I type Türkiye, my phone's keyboard still auto-suggests the 🦃 emoji anyways so I'd say it was a lost battle from the start.

The reason for its change was the names association with the animal, the gov didn't like it. But like nobody from turkey actually cares, it's just a formal thing. Funny thing: we call India Hindistan (which means land of the turkey).

Yeah, the asked the international community not to call them after a ~~water fowl~~ big chicken anymore and use their native name for the country instead. Officially it always was "Republic of Türkiye" and not Turkey anyways.