Did they comment on why it was deleted? I didn't see anything in the article. I recall the consensus was that they made so many mistakes the only way to fix it was deletion of the repo.

I also saw in one of the comments of the Arstechnica article that the one who pushed for open-source wanted to clean up the code before publishing. Management said no, the entire team got fired/left, and suddenly the code got published with all that commercial stuff left in. Sounds about right.