Response from Martin Woodward, GitHub’s VP of Developer Relations:
Sorry for the inconvenience @koepnick - while searching across all repos has required being logged in for a long time, when we enhanced the search capabilities earlier in the 2023 we had to extend this to repos as well (see https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/).
This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.
It’s more gating off than walling. If it keeps access and usage free I’m ok with it.
Do you really think that’s where they’ll stop, though?