And yet this probably only happened because it was getting coverage.

I did my time as a Wikipedia editor. I've watched others do it, too. It's exhausting. You end up obsessively checking your watchlist multiple times a day, then every hour, then multiple times per hour, because you never know when someone will get you in their sights. And then you have to be prepared to obsessively watch talk pages and project pages and noticeboards 24/7 to be ready to come back in and copy/paste sources and arguments and the appropriate WP:IMEMORIZEDWIKISPEAK links over and over and over again to try to defend something. And even then you probably won't succeed.

Wikipedia is eating itself and is smugly proud of it. The effort involved in creating and preserving a piece of worthwhile content is orders of magnitude higher than the effort involved in deleting it, and people who get stuff deleted also get rewarded for doing so, while people who create and maintain get comparatively very little recognition. Eventually Wikipedia will have only two articles, someone will propose merging them, and them someone else will speedy-delete the last one for breaking various rules. And that'll be the end of it.

oh I suspected something like that but it left me wondering why would the copyrighted material stay there and the records of the edits disappear - shouldn't it be the other way around? I've also read about RevDel and that leaves the record in place just hides the summary/user/text of edit but leaves the record in history.

You're exactly right on RevDel (revision deletion). However, in this case only certain edits were restored after the article was deleted—but the copyright violations were left deleted, so there was no record of them in the public edit history.

That's why I've just restored the edits and revision-deleted the (copyrighted) text, leaving the editor and edit summaries public!