And imagine a guy staring at an old harddrive with a 10 000 Bitcoins on it, but he forgot the seed phrase of the wallet.....

If we talk about the very beginnings, then it should be noted that at that time there were no BTC wallets with seed and that Electrum appeared only at the end of 2011, and it seems to me that wallets with seed did not exist before that.
As for those who are at least publicly known, some are looking for their HDD with thousands of BTC in the garbage dump, others claim that they hid them in fishing rods that ended up in the garbage dump again. In those early days, few people could have predicted that Bitcoin would actually succeed in becoming what it is today.
I also find it fascinating that people were able to mine from their own home computers considering this was in 2009 where the internet was still relatively new and something that not everyone was very knowledgeable about
~snip~
The internet was already quite widespread then, at least here in Europe, where I already had ADSL sometime in 2004/05, and dial-up for years before that. Although quality equipment was quite expensive then, because for one LCD monitor that I bought then, today you can buy a solid 100+ cm smart TV or a laptop. I have to admit that I only heard about Bitcoin sometime in 2011, but then it didn't seem like something interesting to me.