Well, as OP mentioned, and others have speculated in the official syncthing forums, apparently catfriend1 did a repository reset where they wiped everything and started over something like three times last year. So that's still a possibility. I'm going to wait until more information comes out or until catfriend1 doesn't come back after a month or two before I start worrying about the future of the project. Worth finding anyone who had backed up the most recent version of the repository though, just in case.