The bit in the article about the recovery procedure, which involves dumping info from the tape into '100-ish GB of RAM' and then using software to analyze it stuck out to me.
This video on the linked github page for the analysis software[1] is interesting:
I wonder if they'll find it suitable to bake [0] the tape first, which is quite popular in the audio restoration world but I'm not sure how much it applies to computer tape.