Point is neither is even close to necessary using git. Git isn't a web application. It's a version control system.

Yes, but that's OT, the topic here is GitHub, not git.

Yeah, and my point is that it's mostly superfluous.

You are welcome to your opinion of course but Github has become a pretty essential part of the workflow for many projects, closed and open source both. That it is possible to work around that doesn't diminish that, it's just how people are currently using it. I would have preferred a much more decentralized solution, I always thought it was a mistake that the git core left room enough for the likes of Github to establish themselves as gateways to various projects.