> create new account

I don't think "need to create an account to figure out that you can't contribute with a given forge" is a real problem. They're just as publicly browsable sans-login as GitHub, for the same reasons: people want to share their stuff. And when you do need to make an account, most software forges have SSO with the big/common providers.

> find it archived, google for new repo, find that one archived, go to new repo

You needed to RTFM and do a bit of research to figure out where/how to contribute for GitHub projects too. They got archived/moved around/invisibly-forked just as often as people move forges today. How many times have you seen. "FizzBuzz is archived and no longer accepting contributions; an actively maintained rebuild of this project is at https://github.com/somebody/FizzBuzz-ng"?

> find they now take patches via email instead of PRs

Plenty of GitHub repos either don't accept contributions via GitHub PR (Linux) or require lots of nonstandard hoop-jumping to get a contribution approved (Python).

> 2-3 different protocols

Git is the protocol. I don't think the move away from GitHub is making anyone move away from Git. hg/jj/svn are still minority tools for the same reasons they always were.

> one index

It's Git. The index is folders on your hard drive. List their origins if you forget the URLs of their forges. Make a browser bookmark if you don't want to keep the checkout around.

Under the most charitable interpretation of your complaints that I can come up with, contributing in a not-universally-GitHub world is like ... 1% harder per repo contributed to. At most. To the tune of, at the very absolute worst, like 2 minutes of extra work when making your very first contribution to a project. I don't think it's that hard to stop googling "ProjectName github" and start googling "ProjectName git source" or "ProjectName contribute code".