There's already a lot of open source work going on around CSL, which I think originally comes out of Zotero.
While CSL comes from Javascript world, there already is a complete ruby implementation, providing ability to format a cituation into any citation style in the CSL style repository. https://github.com/inukshuk/csl-ruby https://github.com/inukshuk/citeproc
Even if github or other open source authors weren't happy with that implementation (whether for legitimate reasons or "not invented here"), it would still have been nice to do something around the basic CSL standards in some way, instead of inventing a new similar standard in ".cff".
"It is is specifically for citing software and datasets… Unfortunately, though, because the schema only has enough fields for citing those two…"
However, the link in OP here suggests they've expanded CFF beyond that to be used to cite anything. https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...
* Zotero, with BetterBibTex plugin [^2]
* pandoc, through its updated citeproc library [^3]
* the citation plugin for Obsidian, which uses CSL-JSON [^4]
This might in the end be my personal preference, but a standardized JSON format (which is just as easily adaptable to YAML [^5]) seems much easier to parse and modify than Bibtex, with its sheer complexity. If we want to have the ability to easily cite anything, then this direction of standardization, I believe, is a must.
[^1]: https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema#csl-json-s...
[^2]: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/pandoc/#u...
[^3]: https://github.com/jgm/citeproc
[^4]: https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin
[^5]: https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/278