…this resulted in a full wipe of the setup for both sites, including a database with 2.5 years of records, and database snapshots that Grigorev had counted on as backups. The operator had to contact Amazon Business support, which helped restore the data within about a day.

Correct, the developer only had snapshots, but the article doesn’t state how Amazon Business restored their data. Amazon business offers both snapshots and full backups.

Regardless of the developer’s shoddy version control, they got their data restored and this non-issue is being used as clickbait to feed people’s confirmation bias.