When I was working at Ford a few years ago, many Ford engineers worked very closely with Argo engineers. Sharing code or data was common, they used our internal tools, and sometimes we would go in-person to troubleshoot with them. A lot of their employees had come from Ford, and so they knew who to call and even already had our numbers.
All that to say I'm not surprised to see they hired back many of those people. Ford is a large company and Argo felt just like any other team within the company at times.
Yeah, this is pretty standard behavior for Ford, I think. Similarly blurred lines with Autonomic. Honestly it was hard to keep track of who actually worked for Ford when I was at FSM.
This is normal on their web tech side as well. I worked with Ford in a consulting role through a very large agency, and there were multiple teams working as contractors, subsidiaries, and full-time employees. The lines were very blurry.
All that to say I'm not surprised to see they hired back many of those people. Ford is a large company and Argo felt just like any other team within the company at times.