They didn’t “lose” anything. The guy just slept through a series of important prompts and stubbornly banged on the keyboard in the manner of “I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING DAMN IT!” when he, in fact, didn’t know what he was doing. 
He admits it himself in the article: he thought he was changing the settings of another repo. Well, sucks to be him but it’s not very hard to pay half-attention to these things.