Then tell me: what else could the reason be? Why make people deliberately think you’re stupid? What’s the advantage?
And yes, this is a thing that happens literally to thousands of people every day. Almost everyone has a “I didn’t make backups” story. Humans aren’t born perfect - they make mistakes and learn from them. How many doctoral theses do you think are lost every day due to missing backups? Or how much art, how much data in general?
Instead of assuming some evil genius agenda hiding behind their stupid stated reason, you could just try to accept that people make mistakes. But you surely don’t ever make any, so why would anyone else?