reading through it, it sounds like they opened a project in VSCode, and it saw that there was a local git repo already initialized, with 3 months of changes uncommitted and not staged. So the options there are to stage the changes (git add) to be committed or discard the changes (git checkout -- .). I guess they chose the discard option thinking it was a notification and i guess the filename would be added to gitignore or something? Instead, it discarded the changes, and to the user, it looked like VSCode did rm -rf and not that this was the behavior of git. Since the changes were never committed, even git reflog can't save them.