If you have access to their MacBook and can open a terminal, even `rsync` (which comes preinstalled) would do the job.
It seems much more likely to me they were just tired of having to manage the languages (and being constantly criticised they were behind) and simply chose to remove them.
you could just take a random person macbook, open the terminal and launch python3 -m http.server 3000 --directory ~
then on the local network you could download all his files