All of their actions point at intentionally wanting that data to disappear, they even suggested turning it on and updating it, which everyone who's ever tried to protect important information on a computer knows is that exact opposite to what you should do.

Any competent engineer who puts more than 3 seconds of thought into the design of that system would conclude that crash data is critical evidence and as many steps as possible should be taken to ensure it's retained with additional fail safes.

I refuse to believe Tesla's engineers aren't at least competent, so this must have been done intentionally.