> I’ve got no pre-rewrite history of the repo to check).

I love this type of story, because it describes a different Internet that I'm familiar with. And honestly it sounds pretty rough out there! But regardless, we all should be using some kind of version control (git), and as an added bonus you'd get your pre-rewrite history from it.

I mean they mentioned they had the code on codeberg initially, so it must have been in a git repo before. Maybe they just did the ol' `rm -rf .git && git init .`