No. His code, testing methods, and submitting code that broke both testing and basic construct was the issue.
You can dance all day around the issue, but a developer who can't get a fairly simple bit of code in good enough order to submit for upstream, THEN can't even test to make sure it doesn't break AT, THEN N is also behind deadline, THENNNNN is also a huge dick about it...not a good developer.
All he had to do was not completely shit the bed, and he did it repeatedly. THOUSANDS of other developers interact with that same list and upstream code on a weekly basis. This guy's code and methods is shit, and deserved to have his code kicked out. He's a terrible developer, and I wouldn't trust his code to wipe with.