The java command line theory seems strange to me. Java has no standard command line parser in the JDK (Standard library). Apache commons cli probably comes closest to a standard, and they support --gnu-style-long-options just like everybody else. The jvm(runtime) has some long non-POSIX options, but that's not very relevant here.

Yeah, it's fishy. I never claimed the Java theory is confirmed, just that it’s what an insider told me after the fact.

They said a dry-run flag was passed in the --gnu-style form, but the internal tool expected -dry, and since Java has no native CLI parser, it just ignored it and ran for real.

Supposedly the dev team was used to Python-style CLIs, and this got through without proper testing.