I have followed the instructions provided in the repo and everything appeared to be working correctly. I ran the mvn package, updated the credentials, ran java -jar target/todo-app-java-on-azure-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar and then went to localhost:8080 and created a new item (which the UI said it completed).
Using the Data Explorer, I couldn't find any of the data. I then changed the credentials so that I knew that they'd be wrong and found that the app continued to say it would create/update items.
In short, the UI appears to be providing incorrect information by saying that it created the item successfully.
P.S. I even deleted the CosmosDB instance and it still claimed to successfully create the TODO item.