Firstly, it is not normal in the open source world. Hell, it's not even normal open source projects owned large companies that are the foundation for a major product - like Android. Secondly, as the story points out, it is a fork of an open source app that is already on github. It's not like the infrastructure for it isn't already set up - they just had to do a git clone, and then use standard CI techniques

Maybe the OP isn't familiar with the modern software engineering techniques we now use to improve quality.