I was also confused about this. I didn’t find an article talking about yet either. My current assumption is that it is just this game and that it is still a closed pre-release. So they maybe just wanted to remove noise from people that don’t have the required specs during their testing phase. It’s also not a lock to a specific GPU vendor as I originally expected from the title.
Maybe an unpopular opinion but why would you care about how privacy invasive GitHub is? Your code is open-source anyways so MSFT can steal it wherever you host it. And if they haven’t changed it you’re able to sign up with just an email and a pseudonym. It’s not a social network where you have to post private information for it to be useful you can and most people do use it pretty anonymously.
So I never understand the outrage about GitHub and MSFT. Git is distributed anyway, the only thing that can be lost are issues and pull request histories. If they fuck up, everyone can just move. Now GitHub Actions, that is a clever thing for binding users…
Does GitHub support range requests for artifacts? With that you could read the file index without downloading and caching the entire zip