If it was encrypted, then the news wouldn't be about someone recovering a quick formatted partition. It would be about someone breaking encryption.

> The article doesn't say whether the disk was encrypted or not.

So we can conclude that it was not. If the disk was encrypted (with decent passphrase/key) there is 0% chance that the article wouldn't mention it.

They also wouldn't have bothered to get the disk back from the YouTuber. Why would they if the data is unreadable anyway?