The discussions scale is a problem of you need people specifically triage and moderate the content. For large projects, I'll grand that this could scale poorly but for preserving information and discussions, it remains better than other options.

And yes, GitHub isn't the proper spot for non-programmers. All the workflows around it are geared to hosting a software or at least a site.

The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue, then discord is too (and likely more). GitHub exposes the information for discussions quite easily - https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/guides/using-the-graphql-... I would be willing to take the stance that any forum that you don't host and access the underlying data without needing to go through the user facing application is lock in. With GitHub discussions, the access to the underlying data is more available than any other forum that you don't host yourself.

FWIW, from my work machine I access GitHub without issue. I can't access discord and will likely be unable to persuade such a change up the chain as Discord is largely seen as primarily chat for non-professional activities.

> The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue

I was thinking here primarily about network effects.