Just that tiny image on his blog was enough for me to go "oh yeah, I used his diagram to explain this type of git workflow to colleagues a decade ago". Someone should have spotted that right away.

Did the one MSFT employee that “reviewed” it know of this image? If not, it doesn’t matter how many people “on the Internet” recognized this image.

I’ll never understand the implied projection.

(I don’t think this was reviewed closely if at all)

I would hope that the person who reviews their training on gitflow, knows something about gitflow. And if you know something about gitflow, it's not that strange to expect to recognise the most iconic gitflow diagram.

But even if you don't recognise the original, at least you should be able to tell that the generated copy is bullshit.

Again, I don't think this was reviewed. It was an assignment to a vendor 'write document and I'll hit publish'. There's a great chance the MSFT document _owner_ has no experience in the relevant area.