That is... bizarre. He should look at the abandoned internal repos of the average software company's experiments and realign his expectations with reality.
Amen, not every github project turns into a popular OS project.
Maybe he thought it was a dedicated portfolio repo rather than just "this is where I keep my stuff"?
I think that was their thought process. My personal Github is a bit of a graveyard/dumping ground but I saw this as a wakeup call and got rid of a bunch of forked repos and combined some unfinished projects into other repos.