Yeah, I was maybe exaggerating when I said "kernel devs". There obviously were people using git before Github.

But I don't think source control in general was as common back then as it is now. Source control was something for serious projects, and a lot of code wasn't under version control at all. If you wanted to host code somewhere, services typically charged per repository, and setting up repo hosting yourself was a hassle.

Github really made all that very easy, and popular. The alternative web interfaces for browsing git repos were atrocious, but even modern competitors like SourceHut are a hard sell to novices.

I think calling Github "just another Corporation build around Git" is pretty disingenuous.