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A devious censor probably would not explicitly call out their censorship with a standard HTTP code.

It seems undeniable that this "feature" codifies censorship, making it more "acceptable".

"Oh, well they used the right code anyway"

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IIRC, the general rationale behind the 451 RFC was that this provides a means for a third party to communicate that they are censoring the content, presumably begrudgingly.

So, in the case at hand, GitHub is using 451 to communicate that a government censor has required that they take some content down, not that the company itself has decided to remove the data of its own volition.

If you send a DMCA takedown notice, you don't get to choose the status code that gets displayed after the content is removed.

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