The commits that were overwritten by "force" are still there on the server. Any admin could recover them pretty easily. They're probably still present in the local repo of the person who ran "git push --force" too, as well as anyone else's machine who has cloned the repo.
The only way you'd actually lose data is if every single person who had a clone of the repo ran gc.
Or apparently if nobody knew about "git reflog" and nobody bothered to do a Google search for "oops I accidentally force pushed in git" to learn how to fix it.
The commits that were overwritten by "force" are still there on the server. Any admin could recover them pretty easily. They're probably still present in the local repo of the person who ran "git push --force" too, as well as anyone else's machine who has cloned the repo.
The only way you'd actually lose data is if every single person who had a clone of the repo ran gc.
Or apparently if nobody knew about "git reflog" and nobody bothered to do a Google search for "oops I accidentally force pushed in git" to learn how to fix it.