While the article focuses on lost stars, they also lost a lot of repository watchers.
This is pretty significant because lots of downstream users and distribution maintainers use the watching feature to get release and security advisory notifications. If this had happened secretly it's possible that a security release would be delayed because they didn't see the announcement early enough. (In fact, in the article they mention they had a security advisory recently -- so it's possible the above scenario has already happened.)
This is pretty significant because lots of downstream users and distribution maintainers use the watching feature to get release and security advisory notifications. If this had happened secretly it's possible that a security release would be delayed because they didn't see the announcement early enough. (In fact, in the article they mention they had a security advisory recently -- so it's possible the above scenario has already happened.)