Most people complaining about uptime aren't free users or open-source developers. It's people whose companies are enterprise GitHub customers. It's a real problem and affects productivity.
The issue is also that those 27 hours don't happen at once, They happen in small chunks of a couple minutes which makes it happen almost everyday and has a ton of downstream build and retry issues. The resulting downtime is probably 2 orders of magnitudes higher at least.
Those 27 hours only seem to happen during the workday when I’m trying to push branches, run CI pipelines or otherwise use GitHub (I don’t use Copilot). Whatever the yearly figure, it’s been a pain in the ass these last few months and it’s unacceptable, free or no (my company pays for GitHub).
Honestly, you're right - 2̶7̵ 87+ (correction from sibling) hours per year is absolutely fine & normal for me & anything I want to run. I personally think it should be fine for everybody.
On the other hand the baseline minimal Github Enterprise plan with no features (no Copilot, GHAS, etc.) runs a medium sized company $1m+ per annum, not including pay-per-use extras like CI minutes. As an individual I'm not the target audience for that invoice, but I can envisage whomever is wanting a couple of 9s to go with it. As a treat.