They seemed pretty powerful while I was waiting for codex access.

I could imagine a world where a select segment of developers got access to an even more impactful tool, with the rest being left out due to arbitrary opaque decisions. How did they even pick who to allow early Codex access? Was it some intern just looking at Google Forms submissions? An algorithm?

GitHub is depended on by most of the software engineers of the world, who themselves hold immense power to decide society's path. All that to say, GitHub is powerful.

I think it meant "powerful" in terms of reliance. When the storage has the items, good, when it locks you out, you are left itemless.

(A limited redundancy warning, along the lines of having mirrors, archives, distributed information etc.)

Care to elaborate why you believe so?