This has also come up in the past regarding moving from e-mail to $currently_fashionable_technology - having some barrier to entry is actually quite useful, since we want people to put some effort into their contributions beyond "me too" or "I had this crazy idea in the pub".
IMO sending an email is not a gigantic barrier to entry, as can be seen by the often low (technical and overall) quality of the replies to many of the threads on this list.
Personally, I do not think that gatekeeping (!) and spam-prevention are a good reason to keep using a broken and outdated system like mailing lists in 2024.
Large projects like PHP will still inevitably attract attention, regardless of whether github or mailing lists are used; I personally dislike mailing lists not because they are difficult to use, but because they are simply broken: every time I had to deal with any mailing list, including this one, I had both incoming and outgoing deliverability issues related either to DKIM/DMARC, or some other issue caused by modern anti-spam measures that mailing lists do not account for.
I really don't think that a modern discussion system can afford to randomly loose messages: mailing lists should not be used in 2024.
Regards, Daniil Gentili.
