I don’t know why you’re shocked about it; updates about the reference wallet team have been posted to this forum for well over a year.
The ECC wallet team was formed in mid-2018. Prior to that (and in fact during), the members that were at ECC at the time (such as myself) were busy working on Sapling, among other things.
No; it was created to develop a reference wallet, and in doing so build libraries and SDKs that wallet developers such as @adityapk00 could use to build wallets.
I don’t know where the QT GUI code comes from (@adityapk00 can speak to that), but the wallet code in Zecwallet-Lite is the combined work of the ECC reference wallet team (the Rust libraries and lightwalletd that were developed as part of the reference wallet) and @adityapk00.