Ironic that this person claims GitHub UI was something to be proud of when it’s far from good UX when it comes to browsing code.
I do think it was very impressive in terms of functionality especially without relying on JS, possibly the most powerful and well crafted UI on the web, but still it was deeply flawed from a UX standpoint.
They lacked many critical features for viewing source code, like linking function definitions, or expanding directories without relying on a load.
I’m sure that the GitHub front end team was of the opinion that users should just clone every repo they interact with and use their own editors instead of the GitHub website. However this has always been a bit of a hassle compared to using the website, so I very rarely find myself doing this.
These critical features you mention are just nice-to-haves for me and I imagine most people as well. I am able to read and navigate fast on github.com. I think majority of code I read happens there and not in my IDE.
The shortcuts to navigate fast can be quite obscure but the capability is there, out of the box. In particular I like the t hotkey for the repository filesearch (this more often than not removes the necessity to click through directories) and the codesearch is just impressive.
browsing code is one usecase. opening issues (and having many tabs of issues open), discussing pull requests is another one. I don't think an SPA would be suited for that kind of content. Discourse might be a counter-example, but they had to do strange things for SEO, and some of its UX choices are also controversial.
I was mildly intrigued when github.dev launched and I could just open vscode in my browser. best of both worlds in a sense, just not very well integrated into each other.
I do think it was very impressive in terms of functionality especially without relying on JS, possibly the most powerful and well crafted UI on the web, but still it was deeply flawed from a UX standpoint.
They lacked many critical features for viewing source code, like linking function definitions, or expanding directories without relying on a load.
I’m sure that the GitHub front end team was of the opinion that users should just clone every repo they interact with and use their own editors instead of the GitHub website. However this has always been a bit of a hassle compared to using the website, so I very rarely find myself doing this.