Maybe it still is supposed to sound fancy to say you didn't read any of the code. The guy definitely could very deeply understand, read and edit the code, he developed the industrial standard liberal for PDF editing (used by Dropbox etc).

Just saying what you want might be the future for development of some kinds of software, but this use case sure seems like a very bad idea.

I very much appreciate the vision he put into practice, but feel sorry for the project being acquihired kind of.