Well, "at the time" is a funny way to put it. That thread is from 2023. The first commit in the repository is from 2013, importing the already existing source tree.

I recall having played around with DSL/TCL (Damn Small Linux & Tiny Core Linux) around 2010 or so and IIRC they already had their minimalist X11-but-not-Xorg server even back then, which I found fascinating at the time. I'm pretty sure I took a curious peak at the source code back then, IIRC it simply didn't live in git yet (tarball and a few patches?).

The XVesa code base that this is forked off of is of course much older.