I agree that having all the commentary in private by default is not ideal for open source. the email verification idea is interesting since it gives you the benefits of not having to create an account.
To me the article was interesting because it points out ways that git “just works” that people might not realize. Like that you can just create a bare repo and upload to that.
Do you mean sending patches by email? The author for the article also despises them as suggest alternatives for collaboration where you do “pull request” by people giving you a link to their repo and branch name (like literally asking you to try pulling from their git repo), or sending git bundle files which get around a lot of the problems of trying to send patch files around.