Forge feature parity is easy to find. But GH has that discover ability feature and the social queues from stars/forks.

One solution I see is (eg) internal forge (Gitlab/gitea/etc) and then mirrored to GH for those secondary features.

Which is funny. If GH was better we'd just buy their better plan. But as it stands we buy from elsewhere and just use GH free plans.

Every company I’ve worked in the last 10 years used GH for the internal codebase hosting , PRs and sometimes CI. Discoverability doesn’t really come into picture for those users and you can still fork things from GitHub even if you don’t host your core code infra on it

Yep. As someone in a similar position to influence this, I’ll also be pushing for at least significant discounts in our contract. The challenge with migrating off for enterprise is going to be integrations & compliance. There are dozens of options that replicate the core PR workflow that people use, and it’s probably fairly easy to migrate that. The hard part is the hundreds of things that hook into GitHub that don’t have a simple migration, even internal tooling. So it just turns into a pretty big project.

Stars are just noise. All they tell you is how online the demographics of that ecosystem are.

Mirroring is probably the way forward.