Maybe. I didn't see enough in the article about the repo owner/committer to make any inference about their intentions and wouldn't jump to conclude it was incompetence or malice or crafty leaking. The only real signal I saw was that the repo didn't immediately turn private when the person was notified.

For some people, yeah, this could be a career killer. For some other people, it might just precipitate a flight back to Moscow or Beijing or something.