I'm just surprised that after going through that pain themselves they didn't decide to revise how that social linking data is handled. A lot of github content is softly deleted by necessity, you couldn't nuke tickets written by a now non-existent user or unmerge PRs so this isn't really a new concept to the team.

I don't think it's surprising they'd do such a thing for themselves and not a customer - I'm more surprised they didn't remove the footgun for future mistakes on their part.