Although the first Minions movie had them hibernating in a cave from 1812 to 1968, the interviewer noted that Minions & Monsters establishes that there are multiple tribes of Minions.
“I was trying to avoid the answer,” said Coffin, noting he’s fully aware of the online theories.
“So the Minions that we know from Minions 1 were stuck in the cave,” he added. “These ones, I don’t know where they were, but they were not part of the Big History.”
The Minions movie very clearly avoided this by keeping all the Minions in a cave after Waterloo, up until they started working for Gru.
Not so clearly, after reading the article.