Heh, was this you [1]? Pretty much asking the same good questions you brought up in a different post.
Additionally, I see that the Senior Director of Engineering, Tim Zallmann, has left a bunch of GitLab project repos about 14 hours ago as of this writing. He was one of the folks who tried pinging [3] Mr. Coutable (he's one of the reviewers that's currently OOO). The ping is likely regarding the discovery of the security vulnerability.
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/76318#...
[2] https://gitlab.com/users/timzallmann/activity
[3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/76318#...