I wish to know whether there is some way, or maybe even some standard, for making a GitHub repository citable in a way that is recognized by academics. Many options have been suggested here, e.g., FigShare and Zenodo, but it seems to me that these routes are not actually established or taken seriously by academics.
For example, I made a Figshare DOI for my GitHub program in 2013 and it turned out to get zero citations, despite the paper related to the code getting many citations. People simply found citing something from Figshare to be awkward so the GitHub repository did not get citations the way an article would.
My question is this: Is there any practical evidence that some way of making a GitHub repository citable is somewhat accepted? For example, can anyone please point me to any GitHub repositories that have actually been cited many times as recognized by Google Scholar?