I'm not sure if this will be helpful to anyone in the future but I was getting the same error message on desktop Github ("The remote disconnected. Check your Internet connection and try again"). I wasn't trying to upload large files so that wasn't the issue.

I ended up going to my github repository (i created it by uploading the files to the webpage) and from there clicking "code" and opening desktop github from there. It then finally published my main branch and now it's working.