That’s not what they said. Pretty sure they said something along the lines of “we looked through what we had, and settled on 1.12 as it is the most complete patch”
I think it is silly, thinking a company like Blizzard don’t make proper back-ups. Them saying back then they didn’t have the data, was just to stall people off the subject. Even the “wall of No” preached that as one of the reasons we couldn’t have vanilla.