why would Pulumi want/need the ability to create new Github repositories? I’m a bit confused as to the permissions here…

What is the context? Neo can create repos for you if you let it. Are you enabling Neo?

That's correct. The New Project Wizard feature can also create Github repos. See VCS authorization

I’m still not wrapping my head around why I would need/want IaC tooling to create repos…

@crooked-ram-3551 For example: You can setup components and templates for repeated infrastructure patterns and then use app.pulumi.com to create a new repo based on that. This is useful when you always do a microservice a certain way, and want people to self service create a repo. And as @little-cartoon-10569 mentioned Neo can also create a repo and push some IaC code it helped you with to it.

Ah. Micoservices. Ok. Don’t think it’s a feature we need, but I think I can see where it might be useful.

I know it's not the permissions that Pulumi requested, but IaC tooling (including Pulumi) is frequently used to manage an organization's repos. There are providers on the Pulumi registry (and Terraform and probably the others) for GitHub and GitLab (but not Bitbucket, because Atlassian is a click-first organization). There are many use cases for having IaC create and destroy repos for you. For example, when combined with something like automation-api, you can provide a multi-tenant service that uses git as its data store; the managing backplane creates the repos, and the individual tenants have their work stored there.