I think they got out of the rut before Microsoft's involvement, but I suspect MS has allowed them to accelerate a lot of it with more investment and a more defined direction.
I've heard that for a number of years the Product org at GitHub essentially considered the product "finished", and that it did not need more features. Things like the rise of GitLab and the "Dear GitHub" letter, plus I believe a change of leadership, helped that completely turn around. Obviously that took time to yield benefits, so I think they've been in a much better place for quite a few years now.
> [..] GitHub has been down more since the acquisition by Microsoft. But that could be all a part of coordinated effort to be more transparent about their service status, an effort that should be applauded.
Not counting the redesign, there haven't been "sparkly" features. Sparkly features are the kinds of things the old management used to let engineers have free reign to implement.
Github pre-Microsoft was rudderless. They were more prone to implementing silly 3d model diff tools and things instead of supporting enterprise features or building powerful CI/CD tools and automation.
Many of my projects have a fixed scope and thus are 'done' at some point. If you develop like this, CI/CD is rarely worth the effort. Its better suited for projects that suffer from scope creep or regular upstream breakages.
Nonethless we are building and operating complex systems.
Testing something 100% has diminishing returns.
Therefore -> you will never be able to prevent all issues. As you are not aware how many changes are happening, you don't have a value which could indicate the healthiness of it.
I personally think that when i'm getting older and better in my job, i still make errors, the amount and severity is going down though.