> By that reasoning though, isn't almost every problem in open source projects a "non-issue", because you can always just fork and do things your way?

Yes. Because that's true. Either you have a good point and manage to convince people in the project, or you have to fork.

Writing irrelevant comments on some news site is not going to convince anyone to spend a combined hundreds to thousands of man-hours work (at the very least) to move kernel development to GitHub or whatever platform you like.

Also notice how you are ranting about tooling in a project you're not contributing to, while the submission here is about something entirely different -- and written by a contributor.