How is the GitHub marketplace a runtime dependency? Code review, project management, build bots or whatever else should NOT affect the availability of your website.

Sure, if you measure uptime of your business and dev team by whether you're serving pages. I wouldn't.

If Github being down means you're not fixing your site today, I'd call it a runtime dependency.

I kind of see your point but it's the wrong phrase. It's not a runtime dependency in a technical sense.

see now you're just splitting hairs and getting into philosophy. if your website will be stale tomorrow because you can't update it today, then that is a runtime dependency imo.

Why it is down tomorrow?

(Hint: sans hug of death, because a runtime dependency brought it down.)

Incorrect. You need build-time dependencies to change an application, and runtime dependencies to run it.

Deploying/scaling is somewhere in the middle.

Yeah, I should have clarified I was talking with my operations hat on. From a development perspective, you might call it a "deploy-time" or "scale up" dependency.

Just because they sell it doesn't mean people shouldn't know better.

naive tip: give your app that is relying on github a SKIPGIT environment variable to ignore the bits around git operations, and just make local changes as an interim hack.