The credential that was deleted in the very next commit

A developer committed a file containing a live AWS access key pair to a repository, noticed within four minutes, deleted the file, and committed the deletion. Both commits were pushed to a private GitHub repository with eight collaborators.

They add the path to `.gitignore` and report it resolved. GitHub's secret scanning has not alerted. The key belongs to an IAM user with S3 read access to a production bucket.

Rank what has to happen, in order, and justify the ordering. Then tell me what is wrong with the developer's mental model of what deleting a file in Git accomplishes.