The sad part is that the thing they saved didn't actually get used and was just thrown out. So it wasn't exactly the big save it's made up to be. But if it wasn't framed as a big save maybe it wouldn't be posted every week or so.
I suspect some character models were reused, and recovering what they did enabled the rewrite that came after.
I think it’s still fair to characterize this as a big save even if it wasn’t used as-is. They arguable needed the first version to decide to move away from it.