That’s gotta be it. You can tell images to be displayed rotated instead of actually rotating them through metadata (EXIF flags). That’s for example also how Windows does (or at least did) rotate images when you clicked on the 90° rotation button.
I remember having issues with this before when later loading those images through some code.
Obviously a good thing to keep the “allegedly”, but that statement doesn’t refute what the other person claimed. They said Meta hired them, not Meta put them in the Threads team.
Also I obviously don’t know how Meta is structured, but where I’m at, it wouldn’t be unusual for someone not part of a team to still talk to members of a team, give advice, etc.