Comment by quuxplusone

jolmg points out that if you use a GitHub URL ending in .diff instead of .patch, you get something much more suitable to feed mechanically into `patch`. (And probably not so exploitable.)

Therefore I retract my claim that this is even a "misuse" of `git format-patch` by GitHub. Seems like GitHub provides both a git-am-able endpoint and a (less exploitable) patch-able endpoint, and the issue is just that OP chose the less suitable one of those two endpoints.