Surely they have a whole army of paying customers demanding proper data deletion ability (required for all kinds of legal reasons - eg. We accidentally committed code we don't have a licence for, or PII of Europeans, etc).

A simple rule saying 'any commit which ever has a refcount of zero will become forever inaccessible unless reuploaded' would do the trick.

However, GitHub have had so many years to correct this behaviour. This is something they should have been working towards from the moment it was clear this is risky behaviour.

I don't really understand what's going on over there at GitHub, everything besides their AI stuff feels like it's being ran by a skeleton crew with only enough capacity to keep things running.

"If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security" -- what happened to that?