I think people (especially those who joined the internet after the .com bubble) underestimate the level of decentralization and federation coming with the old-school (pre web-centric mainframe-like client mentality) protocols such as email and Usenet and maybe even IRC.
Give me “email” PR process anytime. Can review on a flight. Offline. Distraction free. On my federated email server and have it work with your federated email server.
And the clients were pretty decent, at running locally. And it still works great for established projects like Linux Kernel etc.
It’s just pain to set up for a new project, compared to pushing to some forge. But not impossible. Return the intentionality of email. With powerful clients doing threading, sorting, syncing etc, locally.
I'm older than the web. I worked on projects using CVS, SVN, mercurial, git-and-email, git-with-shared-repository, and git-with-forges. I'll take forges every time, and it isn't even close. It's not a matter of not having done it the old way, it's a matter of not wanting to do it again.