IME, the popular-remote-service-is-down panics mostly seem to apply in web development world, where apparently any cool project must have an insane number of dependencies, no local failover or caching, and production build/test/deployment processes that are intimately connected to those dependencies that have no local equivalents. GitHub goes down, their entire CI and deployment system falls apart, and no-one has any idea what any of their fancy cloud-hosted doodads was actually doing at the underlying level of the Git repos or which files need to go where on the servers, so they don't know where to start with recovery...

This is what happens when people cargo-cult git because it's what the cool kids are doing, instead of actually making an informed choice.

S/git/GitHub/

Fixed that for you.

Well, that too, but the issue here (thinking that a central repo being offline means you can't use your decentralized version control system) shows that they don't understand git in any form.

I think it's honestly that some people think Git === GitHub, or that GitHub has some magic secret sauce that makes things work.