Okay, so you could tag your release in the repo and then add the result of `make distcheck` to the release afterwards, without having to check in things like configure scripts? That's not too bad.

Yes, but some people actually use GC to store other kinds of files, like documentation photos, documentation in PDF, etc. I think Github has stopped that and an alternative is Bitbucket (if you don't want to deal with sourceforge anymore...)

GitHub has removed the generic files section, but they have introduced some features for "releases" (basically, additional metadata associated to git tags) and that includes file hosting for release binaries. That should work for most use cases.

Trouble is, a lot of Sourceforge sofware is bundled with adware these days, so anyone with sense won't download from them.

I wanted to make a contribution to BASH recently and went about trying to figure out how, ending up at Savannah.

I don't know if I've just become spoiled by Github, I remember just mailing patch files in the past and being okay with it, but when I came across Savannah, nothing about it made me want to contribute. It turned me off completely and I moved on to work on something else.