Outrageous move to just yank the gem and break builds everywhere.
It's similar to backups, if you don't have one your data must be worthless.
This is a bold claim to make, and one that isn’t supported by my personal observations. Many ‘serious’ software developers have no such intermediate repository for their dependencies.
At my lost job we had the same.
And the one before that.
This mitigation of a risk that affects business continuity is something that all senior level people need to take seriously at any company, small or large.