Okay, well they were very clear about it, and they have a pro version, so aren't removing the customizations that exist.
Secondly, that isn't a "phone home" bit that you hacked around, it's literally a header that loads a GitHub badge, and that's it. It's part of a lot of open source projects.
Blocking the DNS of the GitHub host it's calling back to is sufficient enough for everyone if this is a concern (it's of no security concern, freal), and you don't need a fork for this to be fixed. Maintaining a fork is an insane amount of work, and trusting someone who is maintaining a forked repo is WAYYYYYY more risky than just using the official repo, which has thousands of stars, and multitudes of users poking through it's code.
I for one would never touch your forked repo without doing a full diff, and I'm not going to worry about doing that every time a release is missed by you, or a fix isn't upstreamed...yada yada. I would just use the official repo, and block the offending GitHub domain if I found it offensive, which I don't.