I have no doubt they "knew" it was coming. It takes a combination of committed greed, delusion, gullibility, and short-sightedness to still keep going despite that. That these traits are common enough for this phenomenon to achieve such scale is what's worrying me.
Git is a blockchain in the same manner that a smoke detector (which utilises radioactive isotopes) is the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima. Except git (2005) -and Perforce (1995), which it was designed to replace - also happen to predate Bitcoin (2009) and Hashcash (2002).
Nothing good has ever come out of crypto/blockchain, it's all just scams left an right.