After Arko's direct access was revoked, Arko retained access via possession of the root password (which RC should have rotated at the same time). Arko then changed the root password, locking RC out of their AWS account, waited a couple weeks, and then Joel Drapper blogged about the situation with proof that the now-fired Arko controlled the account, in order to make RC look bad.

one assumes he copied the AWS root password out of the RC-provided enterprise password manager / vault onto his own personally controlled password manager before he was locked out, which might be forgivable if it wasn't the root login for a major language's package registry

It’s only a smear if all of the public comments thus far against Shopify and Ruby Central are also smears.