The first scenario happened because of carelessness and ignorance. He saved his seed phrase on a phone without backups. Maybe keeping it in an email would have been safer since he can always have access to it.
I think for coins like pi which not everyone had taken seriously because of its mysterious time of launch, a lot of people didn't bother storing their keys properly. They took it as something that may never even be launched judging from the length of time it took them to finalise the coins listing..
Nom the less, I knew alot of people who lost their keys to their pi tokens.
Also no matter how hard it is for you to store your key, avoid any thing that has to do with storing them online. The moment you expose your keys to the internet, they already are vulnerable and the chances of being safe becomes nearly zero.