Judging by the commit messages the first esbuild commit seems like Evan moved an existing project onto GitHub while the SWC commit seems like a genuine start. But also pretty unlikely that esbuild was being worked on for 3 years before being put on GitHub so your point still stands.
That seems incorrect.
- "put on github" - evanw committed on Jan 15, 2020 - https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/commit/23c40b1b6a76a8626f1d...
- "initial commit" - kdy1 committed on Dec 22, 2017 - https://github.com/swc-project/swc/commit/0f9532dd5d379292cc...