This doesn't capture all of it though. There's also a bunch more that you can access by looking at commits in the Pull Requests.

It does, you just needs to find the last one before force push and click “browse repository at this point” and it will slow the pre force push history

Feel free to check for yourself, but the commits where the repo is licensed as MIT are not reachable from that UI - only the commits where the repo is licensed as Apache 2.0 (and the later self- created license). The earliest available activity entry is from 2023, which bottoms out at an initial commit from 2017. The code base is actually older than that having been started in 2015.

The commits which have the real unadulterated history of the theme are available by taking the same actions on the PRs (browse repo), as they point at commits in other repos where that history has not been erased not the main repo where it has.

I suspect this probably indicates that the GitHub repo was recreated in 2023 with a modified version of the source with the Apache license and a history that was rewritten to not contain the commits where the license was MIT. This aligns with what people are saying about the historical perspective on this.

https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/commit/... is the initial MIT licensed commit