It's still true, though. If they really don't want people to speculate on why they did something, they can provide a reason. It doesn't require an entire PR team to figure that out.
"Not DMCA" and "not GitHub" is plenty already. But maybe it's a possible malware infiltration, or having something unbecoming committed to the repo by mistake, or anything else that might warrant denying public access for some time to prevent damage.
Also the project is being shut down. Why should they care about community reaction?