That being said, it's important to attribute work properly. It can be easy to mix things up (eg. "my patch" is excusable) but repeatedly insisting authorship when you're not the author of the change just seems disingenuous. I'm sure it was in good faith, but since they didn't address the issue or clear anything up, it's come to this.
Dramatic, and hardly the conclusion people wanted to the story of a free performance improvement. It's not entirely contrived though, and I think the maintainer handled this exceptionally well given the circumstances.
Is this? If she so easily misrepresented slarens work as hers in this case, what other work isn't actually attributable to jart?
In this specific instance, jart had a communication error that she failed to clarify, and so things compounded from there. The part that she didn't author is clearly defined in Git, and the most-plausible explanation is an honest mistake. Assuming ill-intent requires you to ignore the original context of the disagreement and focus on the outrage, which pretty much says it all.
That being said, I'd love to hear what evidence you have to the contrary. Maybe you've got a link to an FTP server from 2001 with the Blinkenlights source code on it, I can't say for sure. A fraud probably doesn't write in-depth patch breakdowns on their personal blog for fun, though.
This is BillG-style product skill -- there is a ton of work that goes into representing a piece of software as something important and valuable that people should buy into.