I believe you have the chain of causality backwards here. In fact, I think it suggests that talent that went to planet scale is perhaps not the issue.
this is like if you were building a high-rise condo, would you hire the architects or management company from the building that collapsed in surfside florida? sure, they know what NOT to do next time, but that doesn't mean they do know what TO do
Like, there’s another angle here: management, yeah?
Another way of reframing it is “maybe the folks hiring at planetscale know the inside baseball about GH infrastructure”. For example: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isamlambert
github should have sharded years ago, every other large mysql user did so much earlier in their growth trajectory
Platform migrations take a very long time and it's very complicated especially with decade old codesbases. I will say the current team at GitHub are nothing but outstanding people and engineers with a difficult task of managing a very large deployment.