It doesn't seem particularly interesting? I would never make a formerly private repo public without first erasing the history. There's no upside to showing everyone your work in progress and almost unlimited downsides.

If they allowed you to git-blame the algorithm, some poor coder would have definitely gotten murdered by a crazy person who thought they purposely changed something to hurt them

> Squashing the commit history before releasing it was an interesting (and completely predictable) decision.

This is standard practice when it comes to open-sourcing such repos that were closed-source for years.