Startups tend to be a "do a rush job so the business won't die, worry about fixing it later" kind of a deal. I don't envy those working on original codebase after the startup is no longer racing its own runway.

I've experienced messages barely better than this in products that were under no immediate threat, and let me tell you this: having to figure out why some changes were made, three years earlier, in a bunch of badly-described commits whose author already left for another job, with no old documentation hinting at the purpose of the changes - this is one of the few things in this job that make me want to shout someone's ear off.