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Both of those reverts suggest those were just non-malicious contributions that the maintainers reverted just in case (and reapplied after review). If that's the proof, then I think you are mistaken. Maybe put another way, if someone says "noptd has bad intentions, so I'm reverting all of noptd's contributions that were committed to stable" the reverts themselves are not proof that malicious commits made it to stable, and that noptd has bad intentions.

It doesn't sound like either of those reverts are necessarily for malicious patches. They are reverting all commits from umn.edu addresses regardless of their involvement with this professor.

It doesn't matter whether the patches made it in our not. Even the attempt is illegal in some jurisdictions.