Right, because package management build systems have obsoleted the need to package managers to be actual people that keep track of the packages that they manage...
Which is "the project"? The answer is all of them AND none of them. That's the nature of GitHub. Zed's point is that for a sysadmin, all this obscurity is unacceptable. Having a canonical source for a package is important. That source should obscure away who the actors are making the package happen. If Pieter wants to hand the project off to Andre, who in turn hands it off to Nathan, that's great, but the sysadmin doesn't really want to track that for every package he/she installs on their server.
That is why launchpad is better for sysadmins. Not because it is better in any general sense. Just because it meets a different set of needs. These are not criticisms of GitHub, these are statements of the reality.
The closest thing GitHub has to a "project" abstraction is the organization:
One could, conceivably, create an organization to manage a project's code, but that doesn't address all of the other package ecosystems that Launchpad executes more deftly.
