Sure, but you're not going to give Microsoft money because you like them and want them to do well, and that was probably the main motivation behind paying for private repos. It was never purely a value proposition of, "private repos are worth $8/mo", it was a value proposition of, "Github is a valued part of the community and I'm willing to pay a token subscription fee in exchange for some token extra features". Partially because, well, it takes money to run Github and if people don't support them, they'd go broke and have to find some big corporate entity to acquire them.[1]
Sure, that motivation started to erode the longer that Github stayed around and the more money they made on their enterprise products, but there was never a sudden shift that forced anyone to reconsider the question until Microsoft came in.
[1] Editing with footnote: This is also one reason Bitbucket struggled despite having free private repos. Atlassian is big and corporate and widely resented already, so they couldn't even offer that value proposition anymore than Microsoft can.
Sure, that motivation started to erode the longer that Github stayed around and the more money they made on their enterprise products, but there was never a sudden shift that forced anyone to reconsider the question until Microsoft came in.
[1] Editing with footnote: This is also one reason Bitbucket struggled despite having free private repos. Atlassian is big and corporate and widely resented already, so they couldn't even offer that value proposition anymore than Microsoft can.