On the other hand this is like not backing up your hard drive. Having a single point of failure and expecting anything less is...
Like you said, he's big enough to shout into the abyss and get a response, while others have to accept that a single point of failure is exactly that.
If we changed the headline to hacker deletes '5 years worth of work', the response would be different; two-factor should have been enabled, should have used a strong password, one password per account, yubi-key, etc. The onus would have been on the developer.
There are plenty of free hosting services for repos, so there's no reason IMO to not maintain a mirror.