It’s not really lack of repo access that makes GitHub outages bad. It’s all the “value-add” stuff on top of the repo that makes outages suck.

You’ve got workflows bolted on top that block forward progress when it goes down. Hooks for when push requests happen, when commits happen, etc. You’ve got code reviews in your workflow that cannot happen when the service is down.

Basically there is much more to a service like GitHub / gitlab than just “write code, commit”. These services enable powerful workflows. When those go down all you can do is write code locally. The rest of the pipeline is dead in the water, which in many cases makes your overall ability to work virtually impossible.