Seriously people: gitea exists. Gitlab self-hosted exists. Drone/Woodpecker CI exists. It's not that difficult to set up a project that does not depend on Github. I spent less time setting these up than the amount of down time that Github has had this year.
You don't ever escape the payment cost of the issues of keeping these systems running. You're paying staff to do it, you're paying a cloud provider to do this, or you're paying out of your own time.
You're engaging in survivorship bias. One of my first 'social' media/forum accounts accounts was lost when the admin of the site dropped the user table from a database, and had to go back to everyone online and ask for people to mail in about their accounts. I never bothered to set it back up.
Piles of other smaller sites disappeared for similar reasons. If you completely ignore all that, then yea the old internet was fine. Oh, and that these days hackers are highly motivated to encrypt all your crap for bitcoin.
Typically big sites don't disappear because they depend on separation of duties between different teams doing their responsibilities. For example, knowing how backups work and making sure they are working every day.
Today if I were using github, my day would be wasted again.
For all the talk about companies trying to cut out on meetings by putting a sticker price to it (this 30 minute meeting could've been an email and cost $2000), at what point do we start saying "this outage could've been avoided and cost us $5k"?
Times that by the the number of external systems you rely on and you start seeing why we outsource that stuff in the first place.
And I can take part of the "savings" and contribute to gitea's further development.