The name is usually read as the day whose owner is Olodumare, the supreme being: a day set apart at the beginning, distinct from every ordinary day that followed it. Ile-Ife also claims to be the place where the world was made, the point from which creation spread and from which the Yoruba dispersed. Olojo puts both claims in the same morning. The festival is not an argument for Ife's primacy, it is an annual performance of it, and the difference matters, because the claim has been contested by other Yoruba towns for as long as there has been a record of it.
That is part of why the festival has grown. Olojo now draws crowds, cameras, politicians and returning diaspora visitors on a scale the rites themselves were not designed for, and the palace has leaned into that, because a festival which asserts Ife's standing works better with an audience. The tension this creates is familiar wherever a living rite becomes a heritage event, and it is the same tension the Osun grove at Osogbo has been living with since its own listing.
None of the growth has moved the core. The seclusion, the sweeping, the crown and the walk to Okemogun are still the sequence, still performed by the people whose office it is to perform them, and still governed by restrictions the palace keeps rather than explains. What a visitor sees on Olojo is the public half of a day that has a private half.