What do you suggest as a replacement? Heartbeat is in use at many big players.
We (in a new place) use our own fail over code now, but we're running databases instead of file servers -- and you usually don't want to STONITH a database.
For file servers we use Gluster, and it works great for us (I'm sure there are reasons GitHub are doing active-passive DRBD) and you don't need STONITH since it's shared-nothing.
Gluster will just throw it's hands up during self-heal if that happens, and you'll need to manually resolve it.
Your filesystem structure won't break, but your files certainly can.
That would be similar to comparing 2.4 kernels problems to the most recent 3.7 kernel. Likely not an overly useful anecdote.
For the record we use heartbeat at work with no issues such as this.
Software quality improves, sure, but you can still learn from the past.
Our heartbeat links are segregated from the public network with separate network cards/switches. So the specific issue github hit here isn't what we would have encountered. We do have quad nic cards for a reason in the systems we run, this issue github hit is one of the various reasons you don't run heartbeat over the public topology. It will bite you in the ass no matter what cluster software you are running.
Unless you also have a disk heartbeat over shared fibre/scsi, or maybe serial but same difference. Depending upon the public network though is a lost cause.