When you need to do any infrastructure change not to mention data manipulation it takes million signatures and meetings. Like 13 meetings to deal with one ex employee corporate cloud folder.
Unless they end up in court. Then somehow million things happen on their own in their benefit.
Dysfunctional organizations have (somebody-else-is-doing-it / im-doing-it) ratios that get way out of control. There's also (talking-about-doing-it / doing-it), where dysfunctional orgs lose the ability to experiment.
This is just corporate "The IT dept ate my homework."
It's a ridiculous excuse, "punished" with a trivial fine.
I had a customer that got accidentally sent confidential data to the wrong email address and it was backed up for multiple months. In the end we left it in there but they considered deleting all the backups that contained this email.
That is a good reason for having short lived backups and an archiving solution with retention policies emails.
It's exponentially expensive to eliminate the base-rate of a "whoops", and not everyone has NASA-level money to waste on IT.
They likely spend all of it on the million meetings full of people who wouldn't actually be executing the change, next to none of it on the team and infrastructure where the change will be made, and then fire the team who made the change.
We haven't figured out how to cure cancer in humans because we turn a blind eye to it when we create it ourselves.