git can't pull private GitHub repos? gh was holding the token all along

You're logged into gh and can browse every private repo with it, but plain git pull over HTTPS still fails with fatal: could not read Username for 'https://github.com'. git doesn't know how to read gh's token store — nobody introduced them. (A GH_TOKEN env var makes every gh command work and can hide exactly this breakage, because plain git ignores it.)

You don't need Microsoft's Git Credential Manager (it drags in a .NET runtime). gh ships its own credential helper; one command wires it in:

gh auth setup-git

That adds a single stanza to your ~/.gitconfig:

[credential "https://github.com"]
    helper = !/usr/local/bin/gh auth git-credential

From then on, any HTTPS clone/pull/push of private repos authenticates through gh's stored token — global config, so it works for every repo on the machine. No SSH keys, no per-remote remote-url surgery, no token pasting.

Verify without letting an env token mask the result:

env -u GH_TOKEN git ls-remote https://github.com/<you>/<private-repo> HEAD

If that prints a ref, you're done.

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