No, Apple was deleting stuff intentionally. That's clear from the articles and cited Apple boilerplate. The bug just caused unintended deletion.

My point is that any deletion is dangerous and unwarranted. If for no other reason, because it increases the risk of catastrophic bugs like this one. Sure, people should be backing up their stuff. But in this case, Apple acted like filecrypter malware. Worse, in fact, because there's no recovery key.