"We risk leaving brilliant developers behind who don’t work well with GitHub’s paradigms. We risk being stuck with our old, technical mistakes because the underlying technology never changes. We risk losing control over our tools because they’re not actually our tools."

That ship sailed 15 years ago. Our tech has already ossified around shitty backwards designs. Every piece of technology today now relies on 1990s-era World Wide Web tech. You can't do anything over the internet that doesn't pass through an HTTPS connection on port 443 of the tcp protocol, increasingly using QUIC, a userland-only application-specific tcp/ip-stack replacing the operating system's, because everyone is too lazy to move "web standards" into the operating system. "It works for my app" is now good enough for the industry, and all is justified by the cries of "oh but middleboxes". Apparently change is impossible because it would require effort. The tech world is now political.

"The more you use and rely on GitHub, the more difficult it becomes to find and use alternatives"

No, it's easy to find alternatives, there are 20 or more. It's easy to switch.

"This PR-centric way of working can also create a bazaar-style culture of low-trust. Low-trust can be an important part of the software development process. Open-source contributions from unknown developers come to mind, or perhaps a legal team needs to sign off on a change.

But low-trust is the opposite of what I believe most smaller teams want; even teams in big organizations. In those environments you want to encourage autonomy which requires high-trust."

Most organizations and teams are really shitty at organizing their work, communicating, and working across teams/BUs. The "high-trust" model is actively detrimental to both the individual team and larger efforts. The bazaar model is superior. Yes, people want to live in silos, but it's actively detrimental and should be abandoned.

"The Pull Request workflow is so dominant now that it’s considered the default path for code to permanently enter into a repository."

Pull Requests are not mandatory, you don't have to use them. Just because your team uses them doesn't mean they have to. But they have become a cultural trope, and culture is the hardest thing in the universe to change. You could throw the baby out with the bathwater, or you could lead by example, and show people a different way to work. Getting rid of GitHub won't stop other cultural problems from cropping up.

"GitHub is what most people use because it makes the complexities of git easier. git remains dominant despite it being complex because it’s not in the interest of GitHub and most of GitHub’s competitors to support anything else."

Yeah, again, culture problem, not technology problem. Want something better? Make it. The alternatives that exist clearly aren't advantageous enough for people to switch.

"We should instead be supporting platforms that seek to do no harm."

Again, there are alternatives to GitHub, go and use them.

But for what it's worth, all of this concern trolling doesn't amount to much. Want to switch? Switch. Don't want to? Don't. This isn't something to spend more than 5 minutes thinking about. When you have a problem, deal with it; until you have a problem, stop worrying.