The point is that they probably also wouldn't then insist on a consultant doing an unreasonable migration and threatening to not pay them if there was downtime. And they probably wouldn't call around to other consultants with the same requirements, apparently telling them that the first consultant refused to do the job.

> apparently telling them that the first consultant refused to do the job.

While I don’t think they informed them of this in good-faith, it is a nice heads-up. In this case, it meant Consultant2 consulting RefusingConsultant that probably knew the IT better.

It would be legitimately interesting if a 10 hour downtime of HN was at all correlated to an increase in github commits.

I hope there wouldn't be a correlation, but I wouldn't be all that surprised if a somewhat loose one was found.