I'm John, and I work at GitHub. Sorry to hear you're having difficulty.
From your post:
> I haven’t tried contacting customer support, but as this appears to be official policy I would not expect a change there.
I'd recommend you reach out to support@github.com, they're usually very helpful with things like this.
thanks for reaching out. The individual case was resolved (found a local copy). But I find the policy worrisome for future projects. If the customer support was happy to reenable access for me, what is the point of the current policy?
"Cloud" (read: someone else's server) is unreliable at best, or malicious at worst like this case. The people may not be bad actors, but the tech definitely is.