Exposed credentials means that somebody got sloppy the password. So yeah, “stolen creds”. Give the fact that a) NYT seems knows which credentials were exposed, and b) We haven’t seen hundreds of other high(er) profile companies have their private repos breached, it is far more likely that NYT fucked up, and not Microsoft (which is what you implied, with nothing to back it up - other than a very narrow-minded definition of the word hack).
Nah, it’s deliberately formulated so it can be pulled out of context, misrepresented and cause outrage. And it works.