Indeed. Back in 2018 and 2019 I expended a fair amount of time and energy reporting a squash 'n' merge metadata rewriting bug to GitHub and advocating for the behaviour to be changed. [1]
Once or twice someone internal to GitHub got interested... and then drifted away again. Years later the broken behaviour remains. And I'm a lot more cynical about thinking GitHub fundamentals might ever get any better.
> I think even the development system wasn't free either.
Metrowerks CodeWarrior was the original development system for PalmOS and was indeed not free (in either sense).
However a bunch of enthusiasts cobbled together some free development tools: the main parts were adapting the GCC and binutils m68k targets to PalmOS's constrained PIC runtime environment (it was constrained even by m68k standards); a tool to convert the resulting COFF or ELF executable to PalmOS's .prc database format; and a text-based resource compiler for generating UI elements using its own home-grown description language to express what CodeWarrior users were using a graphical UI editor to make.
That mostly still exists as it was back in the PalmOS days at <https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net>. And if you hunt around on GitHub you'll find a few people who've kept the code compiling with stricter more modern compilers.
* people typing markdown in text files, where you want to split paragraphs into word-wrapped lines of a sensible length, and consecutive non-blank lines form paragraphs just as they always have in text files;
* and people typing markdown into text entry boxes on web pages, where you would like pressing the <enter> key to actually mean something.
These two situations probably prefer a different default.
Once or twice someone internal to GitHub got interested... and then drifted away again. Years later the broken behaviour remains. And I'm a lot more cynical about thinking GitHub fundamentals might ever get any better.
[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368