[nessguy]

Just as AceJohnny said, the scope of this is entirely different. Restoring a backup for an internal project costs time/resources that the company can easily handle. If it became a problem it would be easy for github to tell their internal projects "No, we're no longer restoring from backups"

Opening up the ability to do that externally would potentially require multiple people working full-time to handle the requests.

"We even offered GitHub financial compensation for any resources required." Considering the tone of the article I think there's a very high risk if github accepted agreed to that we'd see an article titled "Github charges popular open source project $5000 to fix a minor accident"

[Johnny555]

Or, knowing that it's the only way they have to recover from this situation, they could make the process easier to do and price it out as a service.

[ncmncm]

Or, just leave everything in place, always, and have the other code ignore the annotations for exactly as long as the repo is private.

[munk-a]

Just FYI - you can star private repositories so it's not quite that simple. You'd need to determine if the starring aligns with permissions... but I think it's still relatively reasonable.

[ncmncm]

Ok, then have a separate button: "Delete all 54,000 stars on this repo", completely independent of public/private.