Is there anything novel here? GitHub is nowhere close to a delight as people make it out to be. Settling for GitHub creates as many problems as it solves. This is not a recent development, and there's nothing surprising about any of this (at least it shouldn't be considered surprising at this point).
What's interesting that if you ask people why they love GitHub, they'll probably say, "because of its community and its UI — they're great!" and if you ask people who hate GitHub why they hate it, they'll agree that it's about the community and the UI — except, from their perspective?: "They're terrible." It's not hard to figure out what's up with the disparity.
GitHub is a two-dollar bill: better than a one-dollar bill, and worse than a five.
Fair enough, but is there a viable alternative? Continuing withe the OP's main complaint: Gitlab's PR review is also slow and not even for a 1000 LOCs, feels even slower to me than Github actually.
Of course there is. There's Gitlab and Gitea, at the very least. They aren't very popular, but they don't need to be as long as signing up is easy or as long as they offer federated/social login.
What's the five-dollar bill in this metaphor? I'd like to use it. Currently my employer has told me to use a one-dollar bill. As I continue with your metaphor, I struggle to see what insight it's giving.
Creator of Reviewable here. It's been a while since I used Critique, but if anyone in the know wants to tip us off on features we're missing that would make Reviewable a "five dollar" tool we'd love to add those in!
What's interesting that if you ask people why they love GitHub, they'll probably say, "because of its community and its UI — they're great!" and if you ask people who hate GitHub why they hate it, they'll agree that it's about the community and the UI — except, from their perspective?: "They're terrible." It's not hard to figure out what's up with the disparity.
GitHub is a two-dollar bill: better than a one-dollar bill, and worse than a five.