I know - I followed this closely because he gained notoriety via his npm messages asking for sponsorship/job - the accident happened later. IIRC he was let go after serving a year.
In any case I imagine a wholesale IP ban on Github might result in a similar crisis.
TL;DR - Brandon Nozaki Miller (Director of Front End Technology and Javascript Engineering @ Ocra) committed obfuscated code in the node-ipc package that runs geolocation and with probability 0.25 erases files at client computers if they have Russian or Byeeelorussian IPs.
Might be funny at first, but its childish. Striking out maliciously at random web developers surrounded by state propaganda is counter-productive. This just annoys them and feeds the narrative that they're under attack by the West who hates them.
I would imagine web developers over there, being more educated, technical, and exposed to the West, would be the ones less likely to support the war.
Instead of deleting their files, why not provide news and information that being blocked? This could have been an information bridge that would be hard to censor.
Now he's just degraded trust in open-source projects for everyone and ruined his reputation as a responsible maintainer. If you're willing to make your project overtly malicious to random users for political reasons, you might also be the type to rage quit and turn your project malicious for personal reasons and community politics.
https://github.com/zloirock
Last time he became available (doing time in a penal colony) a fairly large crisis ensued.