they're referring to the changes they tried to upstream to zig.

To be fair, I don't know if the Bun team ever did try to upstream it. In their Twitter thread announcing their vibe-coded fork of the Zig compiler, they said they wouldn't bother trying to upstream their changes because of Zig's policy banning LLM-authored contributions. Still probably a calculated political move to cut ties with Zig and muster community support for a Rust rewrite. https://x.com/bunjavascript/status/2048428104893542781

The changes submitted to zig were rejected because they were off an old fork and had already been implemented.

They may have been rejected for being vibe coded if they were original, but they were rejected for being pointless. The rust rewrite was because Bun was butt hurt that they didn't actually help.