This was an interesting take, but personally I think lands with something that misses the mark. I collaborate with my team in slack. I’m really using github to get to my files quickly, view history, or I jump to issues. Any collaboration on github I would say is largely secondary (from my personal experience anyway). Nobody on my teams has ever been waiting on Github for any type of real-time activity, so even PRs review requests are generally communicated through some type of chat.

Personally I feel the author’s final design is also a step backward - while I realize things have been “cleaned up”, a horizontal menu with that many options is too many - and they are not of equal value. The existing division is helpful based on real life use - not the authors idea of what looks good. I don’t need menu items I rarely touch given the same importantance of the ones I use daily - I don’t want to even accidentally read them - it wastes my time. Also, how quickly does this need an alternative solution for narrower screens? Lastly, the authors design is looks to me just like stack overflow - I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s any more modern than githubs current design which has strong and consistent visual language I appreciate as a benchmark for how other products could look and feel. Github looks like GitHub in every part of GitHub, and for me at least, that’s a good thing.