Any particular reason why it needs to be on GitHub?

Having it hosted on some kind of revision control system would be very useful and GitHub is the most prominent public place to do that, but otherwise no real reason.

I don't think they've ever released code with version history, so it would provide little benefit other than a famliar UX.

Apple's Swift programming language is on GitHub -- the full history AFAIK.

https://github.com/apple/swift