Much of the discussion is assuming that because the project was AGPL, then the various contributions were AGPL as well. Whether or not that's the case is my question.
Note that the project currently doesn't state any license (there's no license.md). No idea if there was a license specified before when the contributions were made.
That a point of copyleft licenses. It's not a point of permissive licenses. Providing a certain degree of freedom to the direct licensee is the common shared point of open source licenses, permissive and copyleft.
Even very popular permissive licenses have been written with contribution front-and-center in mind. See, for example, the contribution-related terms of Apache 2. The definition of contribution. The built-in CLA. The compromise on scope of the patent grant.