That noise is the exact reason why I think the design over the years hasn’t strayed away as captured in the screenshots. One of my favorite parts of using GitHub is that the design is clean and easy to navigate. Throwing twenty widgets on there and cramming everything on top of each other adds clutter and distracts users from being able to visually navigate the page. I can’t speak for everyone, but given the chance, I prefer using GitHub over BitBucket and GitLab because the design is much cleaner and easier to navigate.
I block the requests to google-analytics.com, newrelic.com, and statuspage.io.
I allow the requests to atlassian.com, cloudfront.net, "bytebucket.org", and bitbucket.org.
For comparison GitHub connects to github.com, githubusercontent, githubassets.com, and githubapp.com. I am blocking the githubapp.com requests, though.
And finally sourcehut doesn't make any requests outside of sr.ht
Thanks for the feedback on GitLab’s UI density. We’re working to improve the aesthetics and usability of our system, and feedback from the rest of the community helps us do that. If you have specific feedback, please feel free to share more here.
Your point over how hierarchy helps programmers use GitHub feels lost on the designer. It feels as if they're designing for a different user.