This is the case for every open source software ever.

> AFAIK the patch which made it obsessively bring up white South Africans was never published

Or there never was a specific patch for that purpose, contrary to what you are assuming.

> this algorithm repo went over two years between updates so it obviously wasn't tracking prod.

You are mixing up something. The Grok prompt repo is a different repo from the recommendation algorithm, and the former has been updated regularly.

The Grok repo is a smokescreen for deniability (just not particularly plausible).