Does the author have a legitimate reason for having not uploaded anything? I don't see how they're different than any other name squatter, they wanted to reserve the name while not using it. Another person who goes by rbishop wanted to actually use name. From the latter rbishop's perspective, Russ was name squatting his username.

Doing a bit of snooping, this post was March 2014, his first interaction on Github was February 2015. So he still didn't do anything on Github for 11 months after the name change.

Use it or lose it is a good base policy. Just because it isn’t perfect does not change that. Two years(!) is a long time to be sitting idly on a name and is squatting regardless of intent or circumstance.

It seems like GH admins are capable of looking at a user and making a judgement call (no repos, no activity, no SSH keys, and a few forks) to determine that the username is being squatted. And based on the article, the author was just name squatting. I don't think there's a distinction between "legitimate" or not - use it or lose it.