Linus wrote git to be distributed (decentralized) and his workflow with email patches was a core design feature. Github projected a centralized workflow onto git (branch permissions and all that jazz are not a part of git). This has its place especially in the enterprise world. So why do we want branch permissions for open source projects? I think it comes down to trusted reviewers. There are those rare combinations of talent, common sense and OCD that make excellent master branch guardians. So all I think we need is 1. the feature of broadcasting merge requests on nostr 2. the feature of trusted reviewers signing their approval to this request 3. the feature of cryptographically coming up with a deterministic merge outcome and commit hash so every distributed client would have an identical merge 4. a git client/client extension to automatically merge based on preconfigured sign events Every developer could still hold the code local, plus there could be X public repository servers.