After so many praised GitHub for the move, it reinforced to me that people actually do care about their privacy and being tracked online.
Seeing such a large company do this, and having so many applaud GitHub for it made me realize that there were would be a good portion of the population for whom this would be valuble.
Though there have been other companies that have done this already (like Basecamp), GitHub doing this was big because there was more press surrounding it, particularly in tech.