I removed the part where I said 'it's typical for sales people to access customer environments', because I don't know how accurate that is, but probably happens more than anyone knows. Obviously it shouldn't happen without customers consent.
Also, reviewing the article again, the access patterns don't seem to match with this behavior, so there seems to be something else going on.
in the 100s of demos i have sat through, over a few decades, not a single one used live customer data.
I've worked in enterprise IT departments for nearly 20 years and not once during a demo for any product has a sales engineer logged into a live customer or showed actual customer data