The issue here is that those 160k insertions and 130k deletions don't really mean he wrote 160k lines of text.

The way VCS works, any edit would register as an insertion and deletion.

The way writing a book works, is you write some kind of draft and then mercilessly edit by rearranging things and changing words. But you don't change every single word 10 times.

Moving stuff around creates a lot of edits very quickly -- moving a paragraph creates many lines of insertions and deletions but I would never count that as rewriting all those lines.

The same goes for editing words -- changing a word will change entire line (insertion/deletion). If this also rearranges paragraph (due to line breaking) it may cause a lot of edits.

So I don't really buy into the whole premise of this article.