Can you remember you used the default 12 word seed or used the extended seed option?

Missing out the extended seed can also result into different set of wallet even if you enter the same 12 words seed so try to remember it and you might be thinking it as password but it's different here.
He said that he did not use the extended words and he already tried to recover his wallet with a small fund before deleting it a second time.
If his memory is right, he did make usable wallet backup, and knew how to recover a wallet from the wallet seed phrase backup and actually recovered it successfully. So with a same wallet backup written down, it seems to be unlikely that later he failed to recover it from a same wallet backup information.
Five months ago I created a bitcoin wallet in electrum.
With that wallet was created 5 months ago, it's Native Segwit wallet, as Legacy wallet was disabled a long time ago by Electrum. If he did not customize wallet types when create a wallet with Console, I believe that there is no issue with wallet address type in creation and recovery.