You missed the nuance in the criticism of GitHub's UI. The issue is not the presence of a roadblock, but that the same roadblock is put up regardless of how "actually" destructive the action to be taken is. The same roadblock should not be used to guard against both benign and severe consequences, else you have no real way of telling what lies on the other side of the roadblock you're plowing through.
I didn't miss it, I just don't agree with it. With the name being different I'd say the roadblock is different, but you might not agree, and that's fine.
I really don't care about the number of stars my project has if I'm going to make something private. It's not like most important projects sticks out by a very significant amount of stars. What percentile would? And what percentile of these occurances are on this scale? (basically none according to the article)
I'd care more about the number of active contributors who will loose access, if I did care for a message like that.
While the article focuses on lost stars, they also lost a lot of repository watchers.
This is pretty significant because lots of downstream users and distribution maintainers use the watching feature to get release and security advisory notifications. If this had happened secretly it's possible that a security release would be delayed because they didn't see the announcement early enough. (In fact, in the article they mention they had a security advisory recently -- so it's possible the above scenario has already happened.)
I watched people use software for years. If you have the exact same Popup every day, you’ll get used to click ok. Has no meaning anymore. It’s in the muscle memory.
