It was my hope that stackers would consider this question carefully vis-a-vis the phrasing:

Relevant and timely discussion has been broached by Darosior in a Bitcoin Core Meta Issues thread.

I'd say yes. Incessant and unproductive noise from certain people can sap other people's ability to focus on work. But that's probably because I've read about the preface you've omitted here. I know some of the context. And I'm thus probably biased in my answer. In an ideal world, I'd likely have said "no, one should not silence people on a project that has no central authority". Then again, Bitcoin core is just one implementation of the project (albeit the only one seriously being used), nothing keeps dissidents from starting their own implementation and try to get it adopted by the majority of people. One can moderate within a certain implementation, in theory, its effect does not reach outside of this specific implementation. Any company can refuse service to someone else, that does not infringe on someone's freedom of speech. But due to the very specific nature of Bitcoin core, it's hard to really decide on yes or no.

The answer is obviously yes to anyone who has managed a public project or community. A code repository is for code-related things and some very deep work happens there. The mailing list and other avenues exist for other types of conversation.

Yes. Because without at least a minimum amount of moderation... anyone could spam the discussion or add reasonably unhelpful comments that don't further a discussion based on merits.

Yes, there are from time to time scam posts or some nonsense pull requests by people who don't know how to use GitHub properly.

Moderation is utterly unavoidable. If it genuinely was unmoderated assholes would just flood is with garbage.

The only real discussion is to what degree is it moderated.

Ironically, a semi-serious suggestion that someone made recently was to charge a fee per comment... 😂😂😂

Let's say that the moderator could delete some spam, but there is a discourse of freedom of opinion. There are the maintainers who take care of closing the useless pulls. Here we have @Daniela who is maintainer of a GitHub that can tell how much time it spends closing useless Pull Requests.

Yes, because GitHub is a centralized platform and must have moderation to prevent spam. There are plenty of ways out of band to protest a muting on GitHub, so there really isn’t a censorship argument. It’s operations on a high visibility public repo. GitHub doesn’t own Bitcoin. It’s just one window into its source code.

Hmm, if only there was a way to stop spam.....

Yes., But...

Feedback on that moderation is inevitable. It's somewhat important for Moderators to be open to that feedback, since some of it may be valid to consider.

GITHUB IS NOT THE ANSWER.

WE SHOULD GET CORE INTO Nostr-based GIT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.