Yes: often the case is that JS does some kind of data-fetching, API calls, or whatever else to render a full page (single-page apps for instance). With Github being mostly just HTML markup and not needing a JS runtime we could have definitely gone that route. The rationale was that we had a desire to use our product ourselves, to gain better insight into what our users do, and become more empathetic to their cause.

In short: we wanted to dogfood the product at the cost of some time and machine resources