I'm just stating what I remember, I'm not trying to defend Tesla.

For 1) it's the first time I hear it from a technical point of view - Tesla's dashcam records continuously for the last 10m, and should save the data on the internal computer in case of a crash and send it back to Tesla if feasible AFAIR (I'm an owner). IIRC it's not the first case though where Tesla claimed the data wasn't available or corrupted, and then it was actually recovered some time later after pressure from authorities. So I think technically the data is there, but also believe Tesla is behaving unethically and dishonestly to cover up or delay retrieval.

2) I often hear it as FUD, as in: AP/FSD was off, the user just did it by accident, wasn't accustomed to it, or just didn't know how it worked. AFAIR most of the accidents had the data released and showed some of the following: user touched steering wheel and disengaged autosteer/FSD (whether knowingly or by accident), user was pressing accelerator pedal by accident, user was pressing accelerator instead of brake, etc etc