There is no way in the world that the kind of person who writes a post like this and clearly places so much emphasis on gamified social media stats as a proxy for self-validation ever chooses to move to Sourcehut. No way. GitLab is most likely out of the question, too. The author of this post is exactly the kind of ideal customer for what GitHub is "selling" and that the others can't provide.

There was a way to say this without framing it as a personal attack. The author may care about stars because they find that increased engagement leads to higher quality contributions, for example.

httpie would never do this. Deleting their stars is already a blow for their community, but changing to another provider would kill it.

And yet they specifically call out Microsoft. And then the only consequence is "I will probably take a break from wearing Octocat-decorated t-shirts."

Which makes them come out as hypocrites. You don't get to blame Microsoft for EEE, and then continue to help them with it !!