I've always been impressed with how often they release new features, it actually seems like a weekly thing for GitHub. I don't think that the events of the past two weeks accelerated that process at all.
Looking through their blog, they had a dry spell from November 16 (release of the new Repository look) to January 27 when they released the new Markdown comment editor. This is, of course, because of the holidays. Then they released the improved GitHub Importer on February 11 and now PR/Issue Templates and File Uploading yesterday and today.
Prior to the repository redesign, they released Git LFS and the Integrations Directory on October 1. So they had a full month and a half between feature releases not attributable to the holidays.
I definitely appreciate the work they've done in the past few months, but I also think it's disingenuous to say that the last month didn't cause them to double down on developing new features.