Indeed you're right the work that was erased from BitBucket was restored from one of the employees that didn't yet pull, the post was edited accordingly.

Wouldn’t you still have been able to recover it even if everyone did pull, assuming GC had not run on everyone’s machine?

> the work that was erased from BitBucket was restored from one of the employees that didn't yet pull

Actually those commits that you considered lost, were still stored on everyone's personal computer in your team. You just didn't know how to use `git reflog` to find them.