The GitHub UI forces their view of the world and their development flow on you.

It doesn't bother me personally, but perhaps I've already been indoctrinated over the past ten years.

I think things like the personalized timeline and comments reactions may be considered toxic by some people.

(Disclaimer: github employee speaking for myself)

Reactions are not really about fostering “social” aspects of code review and issue triage as much as they are to prevent the need for a build up of low effort “+1” style comments. I view them as a community management tool that OSS maintainers would be much worse off without.

Distributed version control is about making code and patches easier to share, if anything the point is to reduce the socialization. It's a more convenient and development-centric form of mailing lists, not a more social version.

> why distribute a VCS if not to make it more social?

Because it is easier to set up?