Haven't anybody made hardware that can make a 2d flux image capture of any tape yet? I'd imagine it could be done using a staggered array of high density tape heads for modern tape drives like LTO-9. I'm thinking that might help with recovering the degraded tapes mentioned.
Noclip, they are very enthusiastic, but make terrible documentaries. Please hire people who are experts at their game.
Their archive.org link (https://archive.org/details/@noclipvideo) and a link to the 2009 Microsoft E3 demo in 1080i (https://archive.org/details/microsoftE32009PressConference).